flickr photo credits: (1) hummingcrow (2) bionicteaching (3) bionicteaching (4) bionicteaching (5) Serenae
Five Card Story: Easing In
a Five Card Flickr story by N/A created Jun 03 2026, 05:54:59 pm. Create a new one!
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It takes me time to learn a new city. At first, all I can recognize are landmarks. Here's the cellphone tower, here's the statue. My eyes are tourist eyes. Impersonal, unfocused, overwhelmed with the sheer size of the map. There's hope in that view. After all, I can't see close enough to find the cracks yet.
As I spend more time in a place, my memories transform the world around me. There's the theater where I went on a first date. There's the restaurant where I fell in love with scallops. There's the bathroom where I cried at two in the morning. Suddenly, it's no longer a list of places I've been and have not yet been, but an emotional landscape.
I know that I'm truly at home when I notice the world changing around me. A new Jeep parking down the block, or the constant turnover of a shop. Once, a philosophy professor told me that he walked based on the fastest possible route every day. I told him that I prefered the alleys, especially the ones with honeysuckle blooming when it's spring or the shaded ones in the summer.
That relationship, the honeymoon between city and self, leads me places I never expect. Sometimes, these are places I never would have been allowed. Sometimes, I'm still not allowed, like when I ducked through the gap in a fence, wandered past the train tracks, and spent the afternoon at the river. Sometimes, I'm invited in, having earned my way into new social circles. Sometimes, the door was never closed to me. I just didn't know where it was.
As much as I speak of landscape, cities are made of people and it's the people that unfurl the world. Yes, my relationship is with the gingko trees as much as the man that tends them, but it's the people who fill the streets. Several years ago my city hosted a bike race. Away from the race, there were no people. It felt like a double version of the city, one without warmth. But bring those people back and watch the glow suffuse the street.
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flickr photo credits: (1) hummingcrow (2) bionicteaching (3) bionicteaching (4) bionicteaching (5) Serenae