Melody Warnick's Blog, page 5
April 8, 2016
So You’re Thinking of Moving to Canada…
Trust me. I feel your pain. When you say that a Trump presidency will make you leave the country, I’m right there with you, pondering the fact that an entire branch of my family tree hails from Nova Scotia. That means Canada kind of has to take me in, right?
We’re not alone in considering a move to the north. The number of people Googling “move to Canada” spiked 350 percent after Trump’s Super Tuesday victories. One American man who moved to Canada after George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004...
March 30, 2016
Can friends make you love where you live?
Ben Duchac/Unsplash
In 2005, my sister Heather was basically living inside her own real-life version of Friends. She and my brother-in-law were renting a two-bedroom apartment in a complex in Tustin, California, where no fewer than eight of their best friends and relatives had also taken up residence. A band of super-social newlyweds, they were hanging out all the time. Squeezing into each other’s living rooms for Settlers of Catan marathons. Coordinating Sunday dinner potlucks. Arranging pla...
February 23, 2016
How much do you love your city?
Tell your friends in Iowa that you’re moving to Austin, Texas, and they squee with a weird combo of joy and jealousy. They maybe get misty-eyed, or tell you how lucky you are. “Austin is a great city,” they say solemnly. “You’ll love it.” Hear this enough times and eventually you become a believer. Moving to Austin makes us the luckiest family on earth. Obviously.
Never had a place been so well-hyped in advance of a new resident’s arrival as Austin was when my family moved there in 2010. And...
January 20, 2016
January 6, 2016
The Power of Small in Charleston
The highway overpass that funnels vacationers like me toward the high-end shops and million-dollar mansions of downtown Charleston, South Carolina, soars a hundred feet above a very different kind of neighborhood, a part of the city known as the Upper Peninsula. The homes here are small, interspersed among warehouses and union halls, and lived in primarily by low-income, African-American Charlestonians. With three thousand residents spread across 800 acres, the streets have a worn, slightly...
December 9, 2015
This may be the first time a video for an app made me tear up.
Vamonde – 'Every Story Has a Place' from Philip Giancola on Vimeo.
Vamonde is a new iOS app inspired by the age-old question, “What happened here?” This is a way to make the walls talk. Download guided tours through the history of a 100-year-old theater, or the architecture of a particular neighorhood, or the food of an entire city, mostly Chicago right now, where Vamonde is based. Users can create their own place tours too, with stories embedded.
I’m not the kind of person who cries at a Kl...
November 13, 2015
Why people fall in love with New York City
Years ago, when we were just graduating from college, Quinn and I had a choice: Washington, D.C., or New York? In Washington he’d been offered a fine, upstanding job as a legislative aide to a U.S. senator; he would wear suits every day and work in an office next to the Capitol building. In New York, he would have a gig designing textbooks for McGraw-Hill. The two roads diverged in a serious way. The pros/cons list we had to make to handle that moving decision were epic.
Eventually, we went...
November 2, 2015
Love Where You Live experiment: Go to a parade
It’s Wednesday night, dinnertime, and I’m weaving at top speed through the back roads of Blacksburg, trying to make it downtown before the snare drums do. Cranking my window down as I parallel park, I cock an ear. Are they coming? Is that a distant brass section or just the complaints of Main Street traffic? Finally jammed into a mostly legal space, I grab Ruby and run to the corner of Roanoke and Main. Two silent, stolid police cars are rolling toward us, signaling the start of the Blacksbu...
October 19, 2015
Three Reasons Why It’s Hard to Vote in Local Elections—and Why I’ll Vote Anyway
Theresa Thompson/Creative Commons
One of the fundamental premises of loving where you live is this: If you love your town, you do what’s good for it. Except the bummer part is that what’s good for our town usually requires the kind of effort most of us would prefer not to have to make. Take voting, for instance. You have to do some preliminary research. You have to think. You have to leave your house. Who needs it? (In some local elections, more than 90 percent of city residents decide they d...
