Home

I had reason to write recently on the impact of place on character. I also wrote a story that is very much concerned with belonging to a place, which, of course, leads me to think about home.

Chicago is home for me. I've lived here the overwhelming majority of my life, and the only other place I've found that I would actually want to live in, the only city at least, is Paris. Chicago and Paris are both walking cities, and I love to walk -- I can just take off and walk and find interesting things. (New York is also a walking city; London is not; LA most definitely is not -- I was actually shadowed by a squad car one morning walking three blocks from my motel to a coffee shop.) Chicago and Paris have a lot in common, actually, but this is about Chicago.

One thing I love about Chicago, aside from the fact that it's actually livable with a minimum of fuss, is that it's a beautiful city. Everywhere you look is a picture. Quite aside from the skyline and the parks, there are views of the city's backside that can be just stunning. Our industrial underbelly. It's amazing -- maybe it's just an aesthetic stance tempered by being surrounded by all this potential beauty.

It's not always the grand vistas, though -- sometimes it's the small views, the little details -- a morning walk when it's been raining can reveal some wonderful images.

Even looking out the back window can offer up something surprisingly satisfying -- there is a kind of dizzying geometry to the city that shows up in unexpected places.

And strangely enough, Chicago can be mysterious, almost magical.

I think one thing about this place, this muscular brawling city of mine, is that we're on the edge of the central plains -- we're actually sandwiched in between the Prairie and Lake Michigan, one of the world's larger bodies of fresh water, right at the southern edge of the last glaciers, which gave us our rolling northern Illinois countryside. South and west the state goes completely flat -- that happens about half an hour from downtown Chicago. Wyoming talks about its big skies, but we have them -- you can see forever here, even when you're right down in the middle of it all. Three million people and you can still find places that offer an amazing amount of solitude.

This is not to say that this is the only place where I feel I belong -- my mother's family is centered in western North Carolina, in the mountains, and that's been another home as long as I can remember.

But that's another morning.