About two and a half years ago I moved to a new city. I was having a lot of trouble getting used to it. I didn't like anything about it. I couldn't find a yoga school I liked. I hated the weather. I couldn't find dance lessons that I felt were worthwhile. I couldn't find an organic market on a par with the one in my old neighborhood. I hated my new job. I didn't like my house. My neighbors drove me nuts.
Then one day I was talking on the phone to a friend from my old town who, coincidentally, had moved here a year before me. She was having the same issues. Listening to me bemoan the shortcomings of our new city, she suggested that we both needed to get out and "make some memories" in order to make the place more like home. I resisted her advice because I simply did not want to think I could ever consider such an unappealing place to be anything like home.
But eventually I took her advice. I made myself go out and do things where I could take of picture of what I'd done. I did the local walk-a-thons and took photos at the finish line. I took up a new kind of social dance and ventured out to unappealing-sounding venues that really weren't so bad. And I took photos to prove it. I made a point of going sledding in the neighborhood park when the snow was really deep – not my kind of thing, but it provided good photo ops. I found places to run my dogs off leash without getting caught, and I took photos of my transgressions. I haunted a couple of neighborhood coffee houses in all kinds of weather.
Pretty soon, I left the camera at home. Within a year or so, I noticed that when I drove by parks or dance venues or coffee houses, memories surfaced without effort on my part. And so, my new city is still a backwards kind of place, but my friend was right. Attaching memories to a place makes it at least a little more like home.
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