Author: Sofia Samatar

Surely this is the most pleasant environment for walking: a shifting patchwork of brightness and dimness, a quilt of light.

The June heat brings changes to the soundscape of the city. Winter is muffled and still; summer is loud, crackling, brash, and tuneful.

There is a house in my neighborhood we call Finnegans Wake, after James Joyce’s famously dense, fantastically challenging novel. During his many years of writing this book, Joyce called his manuscript Work in Progress—a name that suits my neighbor’s unpredictable, chaotic residence.

“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.