Author: Sofia Samatar

“What is natural about being human?” asks the poet Harryette Mullen. “What to make of a city dweller taking a ‘nature walk’ in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?

On this warm, cloud-flecked day, the city wears its summer palette: green and gray with occasional pops of brighter color.

“Why must we always use only our sight, and never our smell or taste to study a city?” the poet Federico García Lorca wondered. If you live in the Friendly City, you are familiar with the smell—a thick, rank odor that sometimes descends on our streets, especially after rain.

Season of lushness. Everything green, burgeoning. You go down certain streets you know, the ones with the big old houses where the students live. Tangles of fairy lights and streamers hang from the pillared porches, knots and tatters like overburdened branches.

Let’s stray. Let’s wander through the Friendly City, toward some corner we have no reason to visit, on this sunny afternoon in the dogwood season, all the way across town, south to Purcell Park, even if there are other parks closer to home and we have no known acquaintances in this neighborhood.

Look at this row of redbuds! Stunning—the clusters of violet-pink flowers blooming right on the branches, bursting from the bark. The word redbud fully describes the blossoming tree, a single color devoid of green: the special austerity, the purity of the redbud.

There are two walks I often take on the campus of the large public university in the Friendly City: the Lake Way and the Hillside Way.

This week, on a First Friday, when the Friendly City filled with walkers exploring the art and music that sprang up all over downtown, I was struck by the way the character of the city seemed encapsulated by its two bookstores: Parentheses and Downtown Books.