Austin is a city of dogs and bars and food trucks, a pretty city with many quirky passions. At sunset, it is rimmed in refracted light, an atmospheric phenomenon known as the Belt of Venus. William Sydney Porter, a bank teller in Austin before he went to prison for embezzlement and adopted the pen name O. Henry, called Austin “the city of the violet crown.” The hills that serve as a backdrop to the town are covered with junipers that bloom in January, emitting great puffs of red pollen, the source of what is locally called cedar fever. Someone described the citizens of Austin as
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