It is the quality and intensity of our real and lived social connections that can make or break our attachment to a particular place.  Neighbors sometimes pick up the slack for those of us movers who are far away from family, creating a neighborhood culture of caring that binds.  It only takes one or two residents to help spark a shift in a neighborhood.  Block parties, collective yard sales, book clubs, game nights, seed exchanges, barbecues are all ways to build neighborhood cohesion.  Melody Warnick describes a neighborhood that has had weekly Sunday night dinners for years.  This tradition started with five families and has since grown to over fifty families.  The host family is in charge of cooking, set up and clean-up.  People come within walking distance and share that one meal together each week.  If one is feeling a bit anti-social, one can just bring a Tupperware container and take the meal to go. 

What about deflecting $50 each month to local stores for things you would need to buy anyway?  What about not heading on autopilot up to the Solomon Pond Mall or the Millbury stores or Walmart or Home Depot?

Do you remember the walking man on Salisbury Street?  More than five years ago when I brought my son to daycare at the Jewish Community Center, I saw him, a middle aged man who dressed in a starched business suit and swung his briefcase during his fast strides.  He carried an umbrella in the rain.  He wore heavy boots in the snow.  For two years of day care morning drop-offs, he was a regular fixture on the street, heading in the direction of downtown.  One morning, I slowed the car down, opened the window and called to him to ask about his story.  He confessed walking an hour each way to his downtown office and relished the fact that he didn’t need any gym membership.  He was in the best shape of his life and loved taking it hare-like down Salisbury as everyone else fast-pedaled.  Is he still walking now years later?  I no longer have a reason to go down Salisbury during rush hour.

If you go to the Sociology section of the “new release” shelves at the Worcester Public Library, you may find the book I just returned entitled This is Where You Belong:  The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live.  Exploring the “lost art of staying put”, author Melody Warnick ponders how the place where we live can become a place where we are rooted to stay.  How do we feel connected to the towns and cities where we reside?  How do we shift from living in a particular place to making a commitment to staying?  Warnick is obsessed with these questions of “place attachment” because she herself never felt settled in any one city or town to want to make a permanent home.  There was always the hope in the next move for a better locale where the weather would be perfect, the cultural life rich, the nature abundantly lush and beautiful, the people fascinating and welcoming.  After all her moves to what she believed would be the “perfect place”, Warnick comes to think she was all wrong.  Maybe there is no perfect place but just maybe one can learn to stay still long enough to love the place where one is.