Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Tomorrow is the first day of the Persian New Year (Nowruz). Our new colleague Shina Shayesteh sent the rest of the Strong Towns staff this photo, and wrote, “On Nowruz we set out a table laden with things that symbolize our wishes for the coming year: coins for prosperity, garlic for good health, a mirror for self-reflection, a book for wisdom, and so on. The main spirit of the holiday is to celebrate the rebirth of nature, life, and hope itself after making it through winter. 2020 felt like one long winter for the whole world, so hopefully we can now look forward to a brighter spring!”
Happy Friday! We hope some little signs of spring are cropping up in your neighborhoods this week. Over at Strong Towns, we’ve had an exciting few days as we welcomed a new colleague to our team. We’ll formally introduce you to her very soon. We also had a big brainstorming meeting for Chuck’s book launch, which is happening this fall. More info to come.
And of course, this Monday was the kickoff of our annual Strongest Town Contest. Round 1 just finished up and eight impressive cities are advancing to the next round. Meet us back here on Monday to participate in Round 2 voting—and if you’re a Strong Towns member, make sure to check your email for a special voting link. Or contact Alexa if you didn’t receive yours. With that, here’s our favorite stories from the team.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Chuck: This week, Grace Olmstead’s book Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind was released. Grace is such a beautiful writer and it was a delight to get an advance copy and interview her for the Strong Towns Podcast. On the day the book was released, this powerfully moving essay by Grace was published. I’m just stunned at her depth of thought and capacity to communicate that depth. She is one of the most gifted writers of our time.
Michelle: Is there anyone reading this who is in the Pittsburgh area? My college friend, Melissa Dubyak, a teacher at South Park Elementary School, has been doing a “Virtual Field Trip Friday” this entire school year with her First Grade students. School started in September…that’s a lot of Fridays! Students have been virtually visiting various locations in the area—pumpkin farms, the Public Works Department, a dentist office, and more. This virtual tour idea is an excellent example of how to connect with your community in a way that ALL of us could learn from. Please check out her interview with KDKA News, Pittsburgh. She is looking for more businesses to “visit” so please consider reaching out! South Park School district phone number is: 412-655-3111.
Linda: A friend recently shared with me her latest obsession: Geocaching. Billed as the world’s largest treasure hunt, “Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location.” To participate, you download the Geocaching app and create a (free) account to view a map of geocaches near you. There are millions of geocaches worldwide, with varying degrees of difficulty and terrain.
As the weather warms up, and we’re all anxious for adventure, Geocaching is a great way to have some fun, get some exercise, and maybe discover something you never knew about your own town (while still maintaining safe social distance). And when we’re able to travel freely, Geocaching offers a unique way to explore new places.
Daniel: I’m coming a little late to this long-read from The Atlantic about the emerging science of “long COVID”—patients whose COVID-19 symptoms have dragged on for months, even if their initial case was mild. (It may prove to be like post-Lyme or post-Polio syndrome in that respect.) Not only is it a compelling explanation of the state of our medical understanding of this phenomenon, but it also delves into deeper and more troubling biases in medicine toward dismissing or ignoring that which cannot be compartmentalized, labeled, and easily defined. (The Bed of Procrustes is an apt metaphor, as for so many things in complex systems.) I have a couple of friends who suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a name for a poorly-understood constellation of symptoms that can be utterly debilitating but are often written off by doctors as a delusion. If long COVID leads to shifts in understanding within medicine that help patients with CFS and related conditions be taken seriously as well, all the better.
John: Many bird-watchers can point back to a specific encounter with a bird—their “spark bird”—that ignited in them a love for birds and birdwatching. I confess that for 40 years I paid little attention to birds. That changed in January 2019 when I read The Round of a Country Year, by the Amish farmer David Kline. (It was my “spark book.”) I was moved by Kline’s daily observations of his Ohio farm: his crops, of course, and the weather, but also his family and neighbors, his draft animals, and the birds and wildlife there. I wanted to pay attention like that. I bought a rain gauge and a bird feeder and a pair of binoculars, and I set aside a notebook to record some of what I saw in my backyard. My official spark bird was the Dark-eyed Juncos who lived in some brambles just across our property line. I loved the subtle ticking noise they made; it was so easily missed that it changed how I moved around our yard—quieter, softer, less galumphing. Those brambles were eventually cleared out for some construction, and I didn’t see Juncos around our place for more than a year. But they’re back now and have been good company this winter. (At right is a photograph I took just last night.)
In an essay in Orion last month—beautifully illustrated, like so many articles in that magazine—Emily Raboteau wrote about a different kind of “spark bird.” After ice skating with one of her kids in Harlem, she saw a pair of burrowing owls that had been painted on the storefront gate of a real estate business. “The owls watched me quizzically with their heads cocked, their long skinny legs perched on the colored bands of a psychedelic rainbow that seemed to lead off that gray street into another, more magical realm.” From that point, Raboteau started noticing dozens of other painted birds in her neighborhood—blackbirds, grackles, swans, warblers, and many more—and learned they were part of a collaborative project by a gallerist, shop owners, artists, and the National Audubon Society.
To my eye, the project is at once a meditation on impermanence, seeing, climate change, environmental justice, habitat loss, and a sly commentary on gentrification, as many of the working-class passersby are being pushed out of the hood in a migratory pattern that signals endangerment. Most of all, the murals bring me wonder and delight. I can hardly be called a bird-watcher. But because this flock has landed where I live, work, parent, pray, vote, and play, permit me to be your guide.
There will eventually be 389 such murals, and Raboteau is trying to photograph them all. Though a map is available on the Audubon website, she prefers not to use it: “I like the element of surprise. As with actual birders, I never know which birds I’ll see on a walk.”
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Rick Alexander, Vickey Brown, Trevor Bullard, Terrell Clark, Frank Cole, Spencer Cook, Stacey Crawshaw, Grant Daily, Douglas Davis, Aaron Dropp, Evan Ferguson-Hull, Craig Fitzhugh, Patrick Fitzsimmons, Mark Freda, Brett Gailey, Bradley Grinna, Jason Ground, Nancy Hansen, Heather Johnson, Robert Kern, Danny Lapin, Kayleigh Lickliter, Jen Madgic, Lauren Mathis, Coby Mead, Chaya Mohn, Josh Moore, David Morgan, Graham Park, Lydia Petty, Annalee Pomonis, Mel Price, Alex Rodriguez, Chris Schleyer, Lynne Seeley, Renee Siegmann, Carolyn Stevens, Elizabeth Sutton, Shirley Vermace, Richard Wagner, Anne Ward, Beth White, Thom White, Brian Williams
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!