Seeing Your Own City Through New Eyes
- At June 25, 2014
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
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When you help someone find a place to live in their new city – which happens to be the city you’ve lived in for over a decade – it helps you see your own city through someone else’s eyes. This week, my sister-in-law Loree has been touring neighborhoods in search of a home – at least, a temporary rental home – and it’s been fascinating to take her to my own favorite secret parks, show the best shops and grocery stores, the prettiest views, the most rewarding hiking spots. Of course, on top of the opportunity to rediscover the neighborhoods we fell in love with years ago, we are also really excited about having Loree and my little brother back from Thailand, and that they’ll be living close enough to actually visit! Without a plane flight! PS My fave neighborhood picks for living near Seattle include: Wallingford, Madison Park, Kirkland, Woodinville, Bainbridge Island, Redmond (obviously) and I also love Snoqualmie Ridge, though it is perhaps not a practical place to live. We’ve lived in a lot of these neighborhoods, though not all. Yet.
(Below: a view from Queen Anne, and a backdrop worthy of Twin Peaks credit: Snoqualmie Falls.)
And it helped me remember why we chose to live in this particular city – in this particular neighborhood. Because we love being close to a large forest, densely populated with trees – but we also didn’t want to deal with 45 minute traffic every day. Because we loved its walkability, the nice neighbors, the little baby bunnies that hop through the park at sunset when no one else is looking. When the sun shines, there are some fantastic views here – mountains, sunsets over water, forests that filter the light, gentle hills with wineries. I guess it is pretty spectacular, even if we all start feeling a little grumpy around February, when it’s cold and damp and no one can prove the mountains are even there, they’ve been behind clouds for so long. This is why Pacific Northwest folks, by the way, might be missing from their usual social media hangouts – when the sun shines, there are too many beautiful places to be, that we need to store in our memory for the long winter.
Speaking of seeing your neighborhood through new eyes, I encourage East siders – and anyone who wants to be more familiar with the arts and culture “scene” in Redmond, Washington – to come out to VALA’s launch event for “Voices in the Corridor.” There will be art by multiple talented artists representing what they “see” in Redmond – and poetry on the same topic by myself and Kelly Davio. I’ll be doing a little reading. There will probably be wine. What more can you want on a Friday afternoon? (This Friday,June 27, 5:30 PM, VALA in the Redmond Town Center, next to Z Gallery.)
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
