This Is Where You Belong
Praise for This Is Where You Belong
A BOOKS FOR A BETTER LIFE AWARD FINALIST
“[Warnick’s] journey to feeling attached to where she lives is scientific and packed with research, but also feels like an old friend’s casual banter. This practical exercise in intentional place-based happiness is for the homesick and the optimistic alike.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Two books in one: a well-researched survey of the literature on place attachment, and a how-to guide for readers wanting to fall in love with where they live.”
—Library Journal
“A series of research-backed ways to be happy in a new home.”
—Time
“Warnick knows how to make her interview subjects sparkle and brings together the various elements of the book with finesse. . . . The biggest pleasure of the book, though, is the way Warnick’s search will help readers reflect on their own locales. As someone who was already ‘deeply attached’ to my place (according to the quiz), one might think I found little to take away. On the contrary, I gained fresh insight about why my hometown favorites—from food to friends to public places—make me more measurably connected to my city. I also found a handful of bright ideas to get to know it better. As far as experiments go, that’s a satisfying result.”
—BookPage
“Where we choose to live is the single most important decision we make. Melody Warnick shows you how to find a place you truly love and even more important how to make it your very own. This Is Where You Belong is an important book for so many people out there who are choosing their place to live.”
—Richard Florida, author of Who’s Your City? and Rise of the Creative Class
“With boundless curiosity and spirited, seamless prose, Melody Warnick’s placemaking manifesto will make you want to be a better neighbor, wanderer, and citizen of the world.”
—Beth Macy, author of Factory Man
“Between the lines of this marvelous book is a deeper message for those who seek it. Yes, you can find happiness just about anywhere—and Melody Warnick will show you how—but some places are happier than others, and those considering a move would be wise to read these pages first and see where they lead.”
—Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
“A charming, thoughtful book about how to find new joys in your own hometown. With suggestions on walking, buying locally, and visiting farmer’s markets, it’s a reminder that the best place to live can be where you already are.”
—Janice Kaplan, New York Times bestselling author of The Gratitude Diaries
“Our neighbors are an overlooked but critical resource in so many ways. This great, readable book from Melody Warnick nails why we should all be doing more to invest in our communities and neighborhoods to create more connected, happier, healthier, and safer spaces.”
—Daniel P. Aldrich, author of Building Resilience and Site Fights
“I live in and write about a small Alaskan town and Melody Warnick quantified so many of the reasons why I love Haines. This must be the best how-to book ever written on how (and why) to love the place you live. Read it and share it, and then go out and make your community better.”
—Heather Lende, author of Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-town Obituary Writer
“Thoughtful, witty, and engaging, Warnick combines personal anecdotes and thorough research to uncover the power and impact of connecting with the people around you. A fun and worthwhile read.”
—Marc J. Dunkelman, visiting fellow at Brown’s Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions, and author of The Vanishing Neighbor
“Warnick convincingly argues that one of the most important relationships in your life is with where you live. This book is an empowering guide for anyone who wonders if they will ever feel like they really belong to a community. I already feel more inspired.”
—Kelly McGonigal, author of The Upside of Stress
“Warnick’s book helps clarify what I’d missed by living out of a suitcase.”
—Kira M. Newman, Greater Good Magazine
“Warnick’s book adds to a growing conversation among urbanists around ideas like place-making, livability, and quality of life. . . . Today, there are many voices—public health experts, new urbanists, criminal justice reformers, and others—contending for political and cultural legitimacy within our metropolitan centers. Warnick’s book adds to these discourses by capturing an important truth often ignored or assumed by many of these voices: any attempt at meaningful change in a community needs citizens who care for that community. . . . Though Warnick’s account focuses primarily on the individual, it’s well worth the read for any city leader or urbanist who wants to cultivate place-attached citizens rather than transient consumers.”
—Thriving Cities
“An informative and entertaining read.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Journalist Melody Warnick (who’s moved six times in her adult life) has written a terrific book that could help you find yours—or help you make your current community a better place to live.”
—NextAvenue
“Every military spouse needs to read this. Today.”
—Amy Bushatz, SpouseBuzz
“A lovely journey and exploration into the art and science of what makes us feel at home. Warnick’s blend of warm-heartedness, as well as psychological and social research work to create an engaging and thought provoking read.”
—Well-Being Magazine
“Melody Warnick’s This Is Where You Belong helped me cope with my move to a new town.”
—Bustle
PENGUIN BOOKS
THIS IS WHERE YOU BELONG
A freelance journalist for more than a decade, Melody Warnick has written for Reader’s Digest, O: The Oprah Magazine, Redbook, Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Day, Parents, and The Atlantic’s CityLab. She lives with her family in Blacksburg, Virginia.
www.melodywarnick.com
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016
Published in Penguin Books 2017
Copyright © 2016 by Melody Warnick
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Ebook ISBN 9780698196148
Illustrations by Marco Cibola
Cover design: Nayon Cho
Cover photograph: Joseph Shields / Getty Images
Version_3
For Quinn.
You’re my favorite.
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
—Joan Didion
Contents
Praise for This Is Where You Belong
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE
The Lost Art of Staying Put
CHAPTER TWO
Lace Up Your Sneakers
CHAPTER THREE
Buy Local
CHAPTER FOUR
Say Hi to Your Neighbors
CHAPTER FIVE
Do Something Fun
CHAPTER SIX
Commune with Nature
CHAPTER SEVEN
Volunteer
CHAPTER EIGHT
Eat Local Food
CHAPTER NINE
Get More Political
CHAPTER TEN
Create Something
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Stay Loyal
CHAPTER TWELVE
Settle Down
Love Where You Live Principles
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Notes
Index
CHAPTER ONE
The Lost Art of Staying Put
At some point during my family’s move from Texas to Virginia, the thought crossed my mind that I should have set fire to all our belongings rather than wrestle them into another moving truck. It was embarrassing, really, how much we’d accumulated. Back in college, all my worldly possessions fit into a Subaru station wagon. A husband, two kids, and a million purchases later, our house was a clown car, disgorging a laughably steady stream of stuff. Four mattresses. Five bicycles. Fifteen chairs. A rolled-up Pottery Barn rug. Boxes and boxes of books. How was it possible that we owned all this? Wasn’t a bonfire the most prudent course of action here? Much easier to torch everything and start over from scratch.
Now, of course, it was too late. I watched as the twenty-eight-foot truck juddered to a stop in the driveway of our new rental house. My husband, Quinn, raised the rear gate and scanned the Tetris stacks at the back of the load for collapsed cardboard. Then he turned to the two burly guys we’d hired off craigslist for $270. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do this.” All of us, down to five-year-old Ruby, took turns lugging boxes up the porch steps, invariably scraping our knuckles as we squeezed through the front door.
Welcome to Blacksburg, Virginia.
In one fell swoop we had reinvented our lives. You could see the evidence of this physical and metaphorical 1,200-mile shift in our house, a FEMA disaster zone of disassembled bed frames and legless tables. With every book we slid back into a bookcase, every pot lid we shoved into a drawer, we’d feel like we were putting things back together again. Like we could re-create our old life from Austin in this new space if we only found the right spot for the sofas and the side tables.
Really, nothing would be the same ever again. Our family now lived in a town where we’d never lived before and knew absolutely no one. Frankly, that was kind of the point.
We’d come to Blacksburg for the same reason many Americans move long distances: a job. At least, that was the story we told people when they asked why we were abandoning Austin after only two years in favor of an obscure college town in the folds of the Blue Ridge Mountains. “Quinn scored the English professor dream job,” we explained. “It’s an opportunity too good to pass up.”
In reality, moving was our thing. The average American can expect to move 11.7 times before he or she dies. In my case, Virginia marked postcollege move #6, the fifth state I’d lived in after a childhood spent in a single cul-de-sac in Southern California, and I’d come to see each new city in a new state as an irresistible blank slate. Moving offered absolution for whatever failures I’d amassed in my present town: the disappointing friendships, the inescapable, guilt-inducing commitments, the taunting list of unfinished home renovation projects. Each time the moving truck pulled away from the curb, these petty vexations and regrets vanished. Thus freed and forgiven, I’d relish the prospect of beginning again in the next city. Things would definitely be better this time. I would be better in Blacksburg.
Specifically, I would amass a well-curated collection of affectionate but not emotionally needy friends. I’d meditate. I’d take up gardening and yoga. I’d cook more, with ingredients like organic bok choy. (My kids would like it now.) I’d write with precision and emotional depth. I’d make more money doing it. Having completely sworn off mindless hours frittered away on Facebook, I’d read the New Yorker cover to cover every week. No more fussing at my kids or kvetching to my husband. In Blacksburg, I’d be more pleasant, more patient, more clever. Happier.
I believed so thoroughly in the healing power of geography—what a friend called “the geographic cure”—that I didn’t bother to make plans for how these changes would occur. By stirring up the better angels of my nature, the right place would simply complete me.
I realize this sounds like magical thinking. “Wherever you go, you take yourself with you,” a therapist might have scolded (if I’d had one). And yet my life did change from city to city, dramatically so. How could it not, when so many quotidian details depended on where I was, from the supermarket where I bought my groceries to the friends we traded babysitting with?
Plus, there’s true psychic power in a clean slate. “The time of moving introduces so much upheaval into our customary habits that change becomes far easier,” points out the author Gretchen Rubin. “In one study of people trying to make a change—such as changes in career or education, relationships, addictive behaviors, or health behaviors including dieting—36 percent of successful changes were associated with a move to a new place.” Want to lose weight? Stop drinking? Start working out? A new city presses the reset button, forcing you to at least temporarily abandon old patterns of thought and environmental triggers. The Melody I was in Virginia would not, fingers crossed, turn out to be the Melody I was in Texas.
Not that I hadn’t liked Austin. Moving there in 2010 had been like scoring a seat at the middle school popular table. “You’re so lucky!” our friends squealed. “It’s such a great city!” They rhapsodized about Austin’s music scene, running trails, and impressive urban bat population, assuring us that we’d adore it as passionately as they did when they went to college/vacationed/attended the SXSW conference there. Convinced, we bought a house in the southwestern suburbs of the city. Never mind that my first visit to the city was our house-hunting trip. We were going to commit.
Except when we rolled into town after the Fourth of July, Austin was mired in a soul-sucking heat wave that turned out to be not a heat wave at all, just summer in Texas. The air quivered with mosquitoes. Air conditioners rattled and clanked, the only sound in the otherwise empty neighborhood streets. Why hadn’t anyone warned us how sweltering it would be? Or that we’d have to navigate curling ribbons of freeway to get downtown? Or that the high-rise sprawl of Austin’s 816,000 residents would make us long for the quiet solitude of Iowa, the state we’d just left?
We’d gone to Austin expecting perfection. How dare Austin not be perfect? Then, since it wasn’t, the insidious thought came that maybe life would be perfect, or at least better, if I lived somewhere else.
In each town I’d lived in as an adult—Silver Spring, Maryland; St. George, Utah; Ames, Iowa; Austin, Texas—I’d followed the same pattern. What started as This is the place! would be edged out over time by geographic FOMO, or fear of missing out, a vague dread that someplace better existed in the world and I didn’t live there.
Late at night, Quinn and I would lie in bed and quiz each other about where we would live if we could go anywhere at all. Would you prefer a big city or a small town? Do you like the mountains, the plains, or the coast? How important is low cost of living? Good schools? A short commute? Clicking through Realtor.com listings was my midthirties suburbanite version of crystal meth—a filthy habit I couldn’t quit. This is the last time, I’d tell myself, and then I’d creep online again to ogle Victorians in Corvallis, Oregon, or cut-rate bungalows in Lawrence, Kansas. On trips I’d load up on the free real estate guides at gas stations and ask Quinn, “Wo
uld you live in Oklahoma City? What if I told you we could buy a three-bedroom brick ranch there for $95,000?”
Once Quinn applied for a faculty job at Virginia Tech, I channeled my discontent into hours spent hunting online for details about Blacksburg, studying the Flickr photos and Wikipedia entries like they were the Magic 8 Ball about to pop up a message about my future. (“Signs point to yes.”) I slotted each tiny bit of data into a list of pros and cons. Blacksburg had four-season weather. Austin’s two seasons were hot and hotter. Blacksburg had 42,000 residents, Austin too many.
Two years earlier, I’d gone through the same obsessive process before we moved to Texas. The way I was now devising elaborate fantasies about the small-town simplicity of Blacksburg’s historic downtown, with its restored movie theater and hip vegetarian restaurant, I’d once daydreamed about the adrenaline rush of urban life in Austin. The trick was, I couldn’t fantasize about Austin anymore once we’d moved there. Prosaic, annoying reality kept heaving into view. And so my imagined version of Blacksburg became the remedy for everything that was wrong with my life, mostly because I couldn’t prove otherwise. More than anything, that was what I loved about a new city: the thrill of possibility.
In the end, the pro/con lists didn’t matter as much as Blacksburg’s untested promise. Up went the For Sale sign. Out came the packing tape. I was leaving one of the coolest cities in America for a small southwest Virginia town I had never set foot in before. My friends in Austin looked at me like I had taken leave of my senses. But I had faith. This move would fix everything.
So, sure, we moved to Blacksburg for a job. But really we moved because Quinn and I desperately wanted to believe that settling in our best possible town could make us whole and happy and maybe slightly superhuman. That going there we would find some missing part of ourselves. As in any great hero quest, there would be moments of challenge and defeat (see: packing and unpacking), but we would triumph in the end.