A few years ago I read a book about the Danish concept of hygge, which roughly translates to coziness or charm or, I don’t know, specialness. Hard to pin down and harder to say—aim for a Viking horn–like “HYOO-guh”—the concept nevertheless stayed with me for putting a name to a kind of cozy contentment I’d experienced before and kept trying to recapture, most notably at Christmas.

Hygge is the predominant emotion of the holidays. Nursing a mug of hot cocoa, gazing at the Christmas tree lights, cuddling under blankets to watch Elf are all hard-core hygge. Also hygge: doing those things with other people. Along with the physical warmth (crackling fires! blankets!), hygge denotes an emotional warmth, part of what we feel when we’re with loved ones or a part of a community. More than any other time of year, the holidays invite us to seek connection with our community.

Try a suggestion or two from this holiday Love Where You Live list, and have yourself a hygge little Christmas.

1. Invite a neighbor to dinner.

2. Attend one of your town’s holiday events: the Christmas parade, the tree lighting, the gingerbread house competition.

3. Buy a Christmas gift from someone with whom you can have a conversation (like a local shop owner, or a maker at an art fair).

4. Invite a friend for a Christmas cookie-baking marathon—or the slightly lazier Christmas movie-watching marathon.

5. Go caroling to your neighbors.

6. Attend a holiday sing-along.

7. Host a Christmas Eve potluck, or a post-Christmas game night.

8. Take a walk with a friend, even if it’s cold.

9. Attend a Christmas church service.

10. Volunteer somewhere in your town that needs you.

Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter

The nicest thing to happen to me in a while was discovering that Anne from Modern Mrs. Darcy (you’re already a devoted reader of her website, right?) featured This Is Where You Belong on her One Great Book podcast. It’s the podcast where she devotes an entire episode to a single book. Previous episodes have featured classics like Peace Like a River or Never Let Me Go, so I’m incredibly flattered to be in such good company. Go have a listen.

7 items of interest

1. Does winter make you hate where you live? Aim for a tiny shift in mindset to enjoy your place because of the seasons, not in spite of them.

2. “You are leaving NYC for a reason, and if you keep comparing the two cities, you may never be ready.” On leaving New York for elsewhere. (P.S.—The Californians are leaving too.) P.P.S.—On the other hand, some people are just arriving.

3. An easy way to integrate joy into a city’s infrastructure: Paint all the streets!

4. The best books evoke a sense of place, like this memoir that took me straight to small-town Scotland. Here are two great projects that capitalize on the connection between literature and location.

5. Our community saves us. Actually, we save each other. Over and over. (I love the idea of the random Venmo!)

6. Completely free public transportation . . . makes people take public transportation. Surprise!

7. Preserving small towns by preserving their largest empty buildings.

xoxo, Melody

Dear everyone, you are cordially invited to come to my house for dinner.

For a while now I’ve been pondering how I can get more engaged here in my town, a subject that TBH I talk and write about far more than I actually do. I wanted to take action. At just the right moment, I stumbled across The Lovable City, a new initiative of the nonprofit Civic Dinners that I wrote about in This Is Where You Belong.

Even people who like to harangue each other on the internet may drop their weapons when they’re face to face over a meal. So Civic Dinners uses volunteers to host dinners for small groups of community members, no more than 10 people at a time. They invite, oh, anyone in their town. They eat and they talk (and simultaneously build bridges and overcome preconceived notions).

This October, I’m organizing a series of dinners in Blacksburg that will hopefully bring together all kinds of residents to discuss big questions about where we live: How do you feel about your town? What are its biggest issues? What do you want to change? I’m in love with this idea for so many reasons: because too many of us feel lonely, because conversations with strangers lift mood, because a lot of us have great ideas for our town and wish somebody would listen.

I’ve been reading Priya Parker’s excellent book The Art of Gathering, and I’ve learned that purposeful gatherings can transform us. So that’s what I’m working on. I’ll post a link to the online sign-ups on Instagram when they’re live. If you’re local, please consider attending a dinner, or better yet, becoming a volunteer host. Otherwise, find out if someone’s organizing a Civic Dinners event in your town, or organize one yourself.

Eating and talking together may be our last, best way to connect.

Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter

A while back I had a great conversation with Lara at the Married to Doctors podcast (seriously, if y’all are in med school, go listen), and now she’s celebrating her 100th episode with a bunch of giveaways. Three copies of This Is Where You Belong are the prizes on her Instagram on September 6, so head on over to enter. Meanwhile, if you just moved, check out my online course, Relocation Recovery. Tons of tricks, tips, and guidance for feeling settled after a move, all for $25!

7 items of interest

1. “I had never planned to live on the Upper West Side, but after a few weeks I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, and I began, in my manner, to make a religion out of my neighborhood.” This beloved Nora Ephron essay explores how we make, remake, justify, and abandon home.
2. A man bought a Buddha statue for his street and the whole neighborhood changed.
3. Parks > Christmas day! More research on nature’s power to make us happy.
4. An example of a quicker/lighter/cheaper action that creates joy in cities. (Go, Greensboro!)
5. Would you move to a new city if you got paid?
6. Apparently tech workers are driving the urban housing crisis; the rest of us do best in small cities.
7. This video about a group of Australians trying to revive their downtown in less than a week is mega-inspiring.

xoxo, Melody

P.S.—Get more links and funny stuff when you subscribe.

I wanted England, where my family and I went in May on a long-obsessed-over trip, to overwhelm me with its Britishness.

And it did, it totally did. We’re not exactly world travelers over here. There was a thrilling amount of novelty in BBC-style accents and a pocket full of foreign coins. Each strange new thing filled me with a giddy joy. Picture me exulting in the Tesco supermarket over little plastic cups of trifle and cookies called “Jammie Dodgers.” Oh, Brits, how I love you.

Then, almost subconsciously, the four of us started to establish familiar rhythms in the midst of crazy London. Learning the ropes, as it were. There were still new sites to goggle at, but only after we’d swiped our Oyster cards on the double-decker bus like old pros. Only after we’d successfully navigated from our rental flat to the bus stop like we actually knew where we were in physical space.

It was a weird reminder that in a new place, mastery and familiarity create a sense of home quicker than discovery does. Our minds crave the temporary upending of the status quo (something I explain in my TEDx talk). But we also want a sense of control. Sometimes all that requires is shopping the same Tesco four days in a row and buying the same cups of trifle every time.

Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter

I wrote a story for Woman’s Day about small-town heroes like Dustie Gregson, whose restaurant in Asheboro, North Carolina, killed me with croissants. I was interviewed by the very kind Andrew Phillips for LinkedIn. This is Where You Belong was discussed on the Illiterate podcast. Want me to be on your podcast/website/stage? Hit me up.

7 items of interest

1. Good news: Small towns are cheap enough that you can do what you want there. (P.S.—My friend Mickey Howley, who’s quoted in this story, sent me this glorious cookbook straight from Water Valley, Mississippi. I still need to visit.
2. “Same Hill, Different Day”—such a wistful photography project about places changing over time.
3. Millennials aren’t actually staying in superstar cities anymore.
4. “Sometimes when I get off the train I feel like a salmon leaping up the last waterfall, knowing innately I’ve arrived.” On how the geography of childhood stays with you.
5. Funny, these tips on helping kids thrive living in a city (dine at every walkable restaurant, start a little free library) happen to double as stellar Love Where You Live experiments.
6. “The story of who leaves a place is just as important as the story of who stays.” Could you move back to your hometown? Would you want to anyway?
7. A solution for when geography separates you from old friends.

xoxo, Melody

P.S.—If you subscribed to my newsletter, you’d be getting links to, like, xylophones made out of Hot Wheels here. So subscribe!

For the past few months, the women at my church have been joining small interest groups—you know, like Meetups, but slightly more old-fashioned. Book club is an old standby, but now there’s a knitting group, a play group, a quilting group, a family history group, and so on. I was put in charge of the lunch group, because eating at restaurants is one of my core competencies. All I do is set a date and choose a place. As leadership roles go, I’ve had more challenging ones.

Who comes? Sometimes thirteen of us and we have to push together tables and apologize to other customers. Sometimes three of us, chatting quietly in a booth. I don’t always feel like showing up myself. (TBH, I rarely feel like doing anything at all.)

That’s where the standing appointment saves me from myself. Inevitably, once I’m eating my salad (just kidding, my burger) and discussing careers and kids, I’m happy I came. I just regularly forget to remember how happy I’ll be in the future.

While scheduling a hangout far in advance laughs in the face of spontaneity, I’m not sure much spontaneity exists in the modern world anyway, or that it matters. What we really need are ironclad methods to strengthen human relationships despite our laziness, busyness, and disraction, so that we keep building community even when we don’t feel like it or think we don’t have time for it.

In a beautiful essay in Quartz, Jenny Anderson writes about how painstaking this process of building connections really is. “Community is about a series of small choices and everyday actions: how to spend a Saturday, what to do when a neighbor falls ill, how to make time when there is none. Knowing others and being known; investing in somewhere instead of trying to be everywhere. Communities are built, like Legos, one brick at a time. There’s no hack.”

Well, maybe there’s one hack. Calendar the relationships you want to keep.

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Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter: I was asked to be the inaugural guest on a new podcast called Wellness 3.0, hosted by Amy Baglan, the smart, chill founder of MeetMindful. They’re launching a new app called Fabriq to help you socialize IRL, so we talked about finding friends and Sunday night dinners and saying yes and all sorts of good stuff related to social wellness. Go have a listen!

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7 items of interest

1. How one town destroyed by disaster is trying to create a more vibrant version of itself by outlawing sprawl.
2. Do you have a favorite place on earth?
3. Better uses for big box stores.
4. Leslie Knope is my spirit animal so I am overjoyed that someone created a Knope award for best government places.
5. “My girlfriend recently moved to Iowa from Manhattan. She cut her rent by two-thirds while almost tripling her square footage.” Why the Midwest wins at quality of life.
6. There is a Best Places board game, and the character cards include Tastemaker, Small Business Owner, Retiree and Hometown Hero. Sounds about right.
7. Miami doesn’t have a Chinatown. So it’s making one.
   
   

xoxo, Melody

P.S. All the best bonus links are in my newsletter. But you have to subscribe.

Spring is awesome.

I said, “Girl, everybody hates their city in winter.”

It’s weird because some data from Robert Putnam suggests that levels of social capital are higher the farther north you go. The theory is that in the kinds of places that are periodically afflicted with polar vortexes, community members rely on each other more for emotional and physical support. (Witness the good news stories about teenagers shoveling out a neighbor who needs dialysis.)

These are Little House on the Prairie places where winter was historically wiled away with visits and shared meals. That heritage of taking care of others seemingly passes down through a community’s DNA, despite our world of central heating and remote-start vehicles.

Nevertheless, I find myself withdrawing in winter. Like the Pandapas Pond frogs that disappear into the muck come December, I burrow. All my place attachment behaviors recede. I never want to leave my house. (IT’S COLD.) So I see friends less, walk less, skip community events, and don’t volunteer. By March I’ve forgotten what it means to act like someone who loves their place.

Spring is my time to hit the reset button. Here in Blacksburg, we’ve had a string of 50-degree days, not exactly midsummer but we’ll take it. Last night, while my girls were off at church activities, I took a walk to the library. After five minutes of wrestling with wonky earbuds, I unplugged. I listened. To my own breathing, to a couple women urging on their reluctant dog, to robins and cardinals building nests in the trees. The full moon was rising. The light on the daffodils seemed pale and silvery. I thought, “How impossibly beautiful it is here.”

It’s easier to love your town in nice weather. It just is. So if you’ve hibernated this winter like I have, let’s remind ourselves how to like where we live. We’ll sit outside in the sunshine, work in the garden, and say hello to neighbors. If it’s not springy quite yet where you live, it’s coming, I promise.

I’m traveling a lot for work these days. I leave for Michigan in a couple hours. But I’ll be back on Friday, and I think that this weekend I’ll go to the farmers’ market. At long last.

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Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter: Moving soon? Know someone who is? Enroll in Relocation Recovery, the online course I helped create with tons of tricks, tips, and guidance for feeling settled after a move, all for $25!

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7 items of interest

1. 61 ways you don’t need permission to make your town better.
2. Has faith helped you make a moving decision? Or feel better about moving altogether? (My friend Rachel wrote this one.)
3. How to build communities designed for happiness and well-being.
4. Do you keep seeing the same stranger everywhere? It’s a thing. Read a few more adorable stories here.
5. More anchor institutions should buy local.
6. Reason to throw a party: “Every time people gather, they are being brought into the opportunity to help one another, to do what they couldn’t do or think up or heal alone.”
7. Why community development and decision-making is like making biscuits from scratch, not popping the Pillsbury can. (BTW, these girls are awesome.)

xoxo, Melody

P.S. Get a slew of interesting bonus links when you subscribe to my newsletter.

The other morning, as I drove home from a ridiculously early-morning class that I teach, I caught my neighbor, June, crossing the street in her robe and slippers.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m just going to put Betty’s newspaper on her porch.”

I knew the answer already, because I see it from my window sometimes. June scoops up Betty’s newspaper and drops it on her porch. The next day, here comes Betty across the street in her robe to do the same thing for June. They wrestle each other for garbage privileges too, taking turns wheeling the other’s can back up the drive on pickup days.

Honestly, it took me a while to figure out what was going on because it struck me as slightly odd. Clearly no one in this scenario actually needs the help. And yet they keep doing it for one another.

Did I mention that June is 92? And Betty is maybe 20 years younger? They’ve been neighbors for almost as long as I’ve been alive. I’m guessing they’ve been performing this ritual of kindness for so long it’s calcified into habit, something that barely requires thought.

It is, let’s be honest, not the kind of habit that gets written up in articles about the morning routines of successful people. But everything about this ritual of neighborliness or something like it would get your day off to a good start.

It’s working for Betty and June.

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Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter: One event I’ll be speaking at this spring that I want to invite you to is the Young Smart & Local conference in Philadelphia in April. If you work in economic development, higher education, business or government, and if you’re interested in attracting and retaining young talent (and you should be), join me! The slate of speakers is fantastic.

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7 items of interest

1. “Support your local and downtown public libraries” and 24 other simple ways to make where you live better.
2. News you can use: a Japanese town with a rapidly declining population has enlisted the help of a mascot that is “an apple that’s been inhabited by the spirit of a dead cat, and he absolutely shreds on the drums.” I’m not sure why we haven’t seen this approach to talent attraction used more widely. (Important: This story mentions Gritty. It’s now my goal to bring him up in every newsletter.)
3. An Australian town took a slightly different (but also unconventional) route to a turnaround.
4. Is this a creepy or cute way to attract visitors to a tiny town? You decide.
5. Enough Pie, an organization in Charleston, South Carolina, that I wrote about in This Is Where You Belong, compiled an awesome list of resources for would-be placemakers and neighborhood catalyzers (and I promise I’m not recommending it just because my book is among the recommended reading).
6. How to make friends in a new city (or for that matter, an old one). #1: Capitalize on weak ties.
7. Watch this video. Five minutes will completely convince you of the power of urban planning to make city centers places where people want to be. (Related: Australians talk about their favorite public spaces.)

xoxo, Melody

P.S.—Want to get extra links to Youtube videos that make you cry and riveting longform reads and surprising facts and novels I loved? You gotta subscribe.

As lovely as Christmas was this year—and believe me, eating cookies and bingeing The Final Table on Netflix satisfied the soul—I was like “BRING IT” to New Year’s. Fresh starts! Clean slates! Hooray!

That I sing this particular hallelujah chorus won’t surprise anyone who’s read This Is Where You Belong—but it may surprise you that I still, despite all the research, believe in my heart of hearts that there are moments when big change is indeed possible, and New Year’s is one of them.

I love setting goals, pulling some purpose out of my general aimlessness. January 1 isn’t magical, but it does remind me to push past inertia and kick the ball of my life somewhere else. In fact, I’m still crafting my resolutions, using the newness of the year as an opportunity to reflect on what I want to do differently.

One thing I’m doing now. I invited some neighbors to dinner this week. Nothing fancy, just some veggie lasagna on a week night, but I’ve been meaning to do it for months. It feels good to finally make an effort at connection instead of looking for the reasons why I can’t now. (Too busy, too stressed, and so on.)

Are you looking to change? Consider joining Janssen Bradshaw at Everyday Reading for her January book club where they’ll be discussing, ta-da, This Is Where You Belong. A few chapters a week, no big deal. If it’s on your nightstand and you haven’t gotten around to it, this is for you. Or if you’ve read it but want a refresher or someone to talk with about all your awesome placemaking ideas, come on over. I’ll be chiming in answering questions later in the month too.

And as a second impetus for January-related changes, I’m overjoyed to share this printable Love Where You Live checklist, designed by reader and calligrapher Emma Ashby. It’s a lot to get on one page, but she achieved it, and it’s adorable.

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Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter: Haven’t we had quite enough shameless self-promotion already? No? Okay, then get yourself and your geographically unstable friends over to enroll in Relocation Recovery, the new online course I helped create. Tons of tricks, tips, and guidance for feeling settled after a move, all for $25! And if you don’t already, come follow me on Instagram. It’s my favorite social media platform (not saying a lot), and I’m almost to 1,000 followers. The suspense is killing me!

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7 items of interest

1. “Be comically aggressive in your efforts to make friends” and other lessons from starting over in a new city.
2. No one’s buying starter homes anymore. (I WAS QUOTED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES! WHAT.)
3. You don’t have to put your startup in Silicon Valley.
4. 101 books about where and how we live. I loved Our Towns, Evicted, and The Perfect $100,000 House.
5. A discussion from On Being about landscapes and beauty and what they do for the soul.
6. What it’s like to have 12 homes in 15 years. (She beats me.)
7. Hackable Cities, a beautiful guide to placemaking where you live.

Want more goodness? Book recommendations, video links, articles that have helped me? You have to be a subscriber.

Time heals all wounds. That’s why, if you’ve lived in the same place for a few years, you may start to say ridiculous things like, “Let’s move. It’ll be fun.”

I don’t blame you. I myself had forgotten how much relocating sucks until this past spring, when for the first time in six years my family moved houses. Suddenly it was like: “Oh. Yeah.” And I didn’t even leave my town! It was a mere fraction of the crappiness of moving to a new city!

Once I’d remembered how real and disconcerting all those relocation-induced emotions can be—you know, enjoyable sensations of being totally lost, lonely, and overwhelmed—I wanted a solid way to help. So I partnered with relocation coach Marni Cummings to create an online course called Relocation Recovery.

If you’ve moved in the past few years (or if you’re still struggling to put down roots where you are), this course is for you.

• It’s simple and self-paced.
• It’s full of ideas for processing what you’re going through and making yourself feel better.
• The challenges, if you do them, could change everything.
• It’s only $25.

I’m really excited about Relocation Recovery precisely because I remember the pain. Go check it out.

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7 items of interest

1. He started something called Neighbours in a Yard—”and it was sheer joy.”
2. I keep a spreadsheet of placemaking ideas I love, and this Philadelphia awesomeness made the cut. (Also I’m strangely obsessed with this Philadelphia awesomeness.)
3. On returning to your rural hometown: “There is something incredibly powerful about the way we show up with each other in small, daily ways.”
4. Neighborhoods shape children for life, according to these maps.
5. Pretty sure this mayor is my hero.
6. Me on the Strong Towns podcast. Go listen.
7. Favorite Halloween candy by state. THIS IS IMPORTANT, GUYS.

xoxo, Melody

Remember, the only way you get access to my amazing random bonus links—book recommendations, Netflix picks, recipes, funny New Yorker cartoons, and other bits of enjoyable weirdness, is to subscribe to my newsletter. It only comes about once every two months. NBD.

You don’t buy a lot and build a brand-new house without thinking for about a bajillion hours about the kind of place you’d like to have. For my husband and me, those bajillion hours distilled down to a few core principles rooted in everything I’ve ever learned about place attachment:

• We wanted an infill lot in an existing neighborhood with trees
• We wanted to be in walking distance to stuff we cared about
• We wanted to be closer to downtown
• We wanted a front porch

Five months in, I stand by all those decisions. Maybe the porch most of all.

In builder’s terms, it’s dead space, a $10,000 boondoggle. In life terms, it’s what spans the gap between inside and outside, private home and neighborhood. It’s where we read after dinner and watch the rain without getting wet. It’s the quiet vantage point from which I can greet (okay, spy on) the neighborhoods.

When I get ambitious, I’ll mimic my friend Dawn’s family and institute weekly “open porch” nights. Pop some popcorn, stir up some lemonade, and issue a standing invitation to stop by and chat.

Do you have a porch? Do you want one?

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Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter

Just another month till we’re ready to kick off our new online mini course! For not much time or money, it will make you less of a mess after a move.

If you relocated this summer, or last summer, or soon, sign up for our mailing list to get more details.

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7 items of interest

1. The nutty finances of living where you want to live.
2. This will make you want to move to a small town. In Texas.
3. When place attachment means running for office.
4. Gentrification summed up.
5. The world’s most Instagrammable mural.
6. Are you anti–open concept? “Nothing is more maddening than trying to read or watch television in the tall-ceilinged living room with someone banging pots and pans or using the food processor 10 feet away in the open kitchen.” #FirstWorldProblems
7. A short podcast about the travails of moving. (I got interviewed!)

xoxo, Melody

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