Love letters to the city you love


I just love my city. I live in Glendale, Arizona, which is a suburb of Phoenix. I've only lived two other places in my life, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, but Phoenix is my home. Palm trees grow, and rents are low... let me tell you all about it! Sit down, I'll be talking quite a bit!

And there you have it. Loving a city means talking about it all of the time, which is what I do IRL (In Real Life) and in cyberspace. And I'm one of the lucky ones who gets to live in a place that they love. Some people aren't so lucky, and they seem to always be thinking of the city that they love. My heart aches for them.

Affection for a city, like any type of love, can be a wonderful thing, or it can be awful. I've known people who seem to think that loving somewhere means hating somewhere else, and that makes me sad. I don't hate Minneapolis, or Los Angeles, or any other place that people love, that just makes no sense to me. I can love without hating.

I have a brother who lives in the Bay Area of San Francisco, and he is head over heels in love. He must be, to pay that much to live there! When we talk on the phone, I ask him to tell me what he's looking at, and it's never a dull description. He may tell me that he's looking at the Bay Bridge, or the Oakland Hills. Love oozes out of every word he says. I like that.

For me, I want to know everything there is to know about the city I love. I want to know its past, present, and future. I call that "history adventuring", and really it's just my way of expressing my love. I can't get enough of it, as friends of mine know. I've seen Camelback Mountain thousands of times, and would love to see it thousands more times!

What I'm discovering in a long life is that love isn't blind, it's just selective. I'm willing to overlook the 100-degree-plus temperatures of Phoenix, and the other things that are just "it is what it is". I'm not willing to accept bad things that can be changed, such as cutting down trees. I'd love to see more trees in the city that I love! Oh yeah, and less red-light-running would be nice.

If you're lucky enough to be living in the city that you love, and it's Phoenix, you understand what I do every day. I write love letters.

Image at the top of this post: Looking north at downtown Phoenix and the Phoenix Mountains from 27th Avenue and Southern in 2018.
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