Author: Sofia Samatar

The other day I was walking along College Avenue, a neighborhood I know well in all its seasons, when a perfectly unfamiliar house suddenly loomed up on one side of the street.

The desire path doesn’t listen to me or you. It heeds a need. It responds to hunger. It is not exactly against authority; authority doesn’t figure in its calculations. It is not interested in the plan.

In the Friendly City, it’s worth noting, a dead end is not always dead to a pedestrian.

The perfection, the absolute perfection of a golden September day in the Friendly City.

They tore down the Virginia Theater and put in a parking lot. But you can still see, she tells me, in the brick buildings downtown, the outlines of former architecture, the shadowy shapes of windows that will never open again.

“I have a question for you,” he said. “Why do you live here?”

Friends and neighbors, I advise you not to walk on Country Club Road.

thought I’d walked everywhere I could in this town, circled every place I could reach from my front door. It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that I really became a walker, during lockdown, when I’d go on long rambles just for something to do.