I recently married my boyfriend Rob and moved ten minutes from my home in Sanger Heights into a garage flat belonging to a couple from our church. Rob had been living here for a few months already and as we headed home from our honeymoon in Santa Fe, I began thinking about what our new […]
Few things provide a lesson in urban banality like driving from one Texas city to another along Interstate 35. Over the past two months, I’ve found myself resigned to this unfortunate experience several times for trips to Houston, San Antonio, Garland, and Dallas, and then back to Waco each time. If I’m driving alone, the […]
My first summer of living in Waco, Texas, I sat up late one night journaling. It had been about 10 months since leaving Brooklyn. What did I miss, exactly, I wondered to myself as I leaned my head back against my pillow. A few predictable answers filled my mind: public transit, bodegas guarded by one-eyed […]
During our honeymoon last month, my newly minted husband and I ventured from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Albuquerque in search of a burrito from Sadie’s, an infamous, 60-plus-year-old, family-run restaurant that Rob grew up frequenting with friends and family during the Albuquerque-based chapter of his high school career. Although a typical “Texas is best” […]
I originally thought this email newsletter would be about interesting trends, articles and podcasts related to cities. It might grow into that, but for now, I’d like to take a more personal direction and write about things I’ve learned about cities as I’ve navigated a very unexpected transition from living in the grand metropolis of New York […]
A few weeks ago, my boyfriend Rob and I were driving back after a long hike in Waco’s beautiful Cameron Park when we spotted a locally owned baked-goods truck a few blocks from my house. After living in this neighborhood for almost a year, I decided it was time to try their gluten-free bacon jalapeno […]
This article originally ran for Strong Towns. Nearly a year ago, just after moving to Waco, Texas, I found myself huddled on the couch with my roommate, wearing every possible layer I could and jumping up every few minutes to do jumping jacks and burpees. Once in a while, I’d peek outside the window and […]
As more Americans receive COVID-19 vaccines, “getting back to normal” has become the phrase du jour. But when it comes to the design of our cities and neighborhoods, some city leaders are wondering if getting back to normal is truly worth it. Should we really be going back to relying on cars for every single outing? Some […]
This essay originally appeared in Verily Magazine in October, 2021 Roughly a year ago (13 months to be exact), I found myself sitting in the passenger’s seat of a friend’s car, clutching a baby fiddle leaf fig tree I had bought from Trader Joe’s in Austin two hours earlier. I was fresh off a plane […]
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I lived in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. As August rolled around, I made a spontaneous move and have spent the latter part of the pandemic from Waco, Texas. My experience in these two extremely different contexts has given me a chance to see how the […]