What do you love about where you live?
I appreciate this question being asked. It’s giving me the opportunity to try and think positively about where I live. Because truthfully, I don’t love it. I love my house, with the backyard up against the high school football field and the soccer practice fields. I love the huge magnolia tree in the backyard that provides shade for sitting and shade for the back corner of our house, making the back bedroom darker and cooler than the other rooms.
But I don’t love the city where my house is. The city name is Fayetteville and the widely used nickname is Fayettenam. There is an insanely large amount of violent crime of varying degrees that happens here. There have been shootings at family festivals and events during daylight hours this year. It’s gotten to the point that many people make sure to not be out in certain areas after dark. Not all parts are bad, as it is with all cities I’m sure. I noticed this one Saturday evening when I ran to the store to get kool aid packets to make slushies. It was around 9 pm and the store I normally go to didn’t have the flavor I wanted. So I drove about 4 or 5 miles to a different store. They had the flavor I wanted. They also had cops in the parking lot just sitting with their lights off. Monitoring. There weren’t any police cars at the first store. That 4 or 5 miles was the difference between two neighborhoods with a different vibe—for lack of a better word. My point being, there was an obvious difference in what kind of neighborhoods they were.
Again, all cities are probably like that. That’s what many people say in defense of our city in local Facebook groups. That’s fair, I suppose. I don’t know what it’s like to live in other cities. I’ve lived here for half of my life.
But, back to the original question. What do I love about it? Honestly, it’s the central location of it within my state of North Carolina. The entire east side of the state is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean. The entire west side is lined with the Appalachian Mountains. The coast is about a 2-2.5 hour drive, easily done in a day. Many day trips to the beach have been taken over the years. Trips to the northern part of the coast where the outer banks are take longer.
The mountains are a 3.5-4 hour drive in the other direction. My husband has made that round trip in a day several times when he has work meetings out there. When we go for fun, we usually stay overnight.
So while another complaint about my city is that there’s really nothing to do here, the ocean and the mountains offer seemingly endless possibilities after only a short drive. There’s also fun things to do or shops to visit in other cities in my state. As a whole, I’m pretty happy with the state I live in. The city, not so much.
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