A Final Season In Chicago...

One last look before I go.

16 May, 2023 — 5:53pm

I took my camera for a walk this afternoon. Cool and windy — the lake air whipping through the narrow, tree-lined streets of my sleepy northern neighborhood. For the last 11 years, I’ve called Rogers Park my home. The furthest distance north a person can live and still call themselves a Chicagoan. More trees than streetlamps. More historic homes than high rises.

It was the perfect place for a homesick country boy to land in 2012 and it has never once betrayed my trust.

A decorative entryway to a classic Chicago courtyard building. Its heavy, dark wood door gilded by an arch of carved stone framing it against the tan brick behind it. The front lights glowing soft and yellow. Juliet balconies flank it on either side, one story above. The stone-lined path is strewn with fallen oak seed and pollen.

My feet stepped lightly from the doorway and into the building’s courtyard. No real plan of where to go, no need to find my way there quickly. A neighbor and his dog sprinted past me. The pup having escaped from his leash and taking full advantage of his freshly acquired freedom. No chance of my stopping him. He was less a dog and more a peanut-butter-colored flash of lightning, leaving a cloud of shaggy hair in his wake.

This time of year is a special one. Transitional in its seasonal apparel. Trees waking from their seemingly infinite wintertime slumber — a contagious verdant yawn, hopping from one branch to the next. Buds blooming into sprouts, growing into leaves. Stretching outward and upward, soaking up the sun. The neighborhood breathes a collective sigh of relief as the streets are once again shaded by the familiar canopy of oak, elm, and maple.

Oak seeds lie like golden feathers in an outstretched hand. Fanning layers of drying wings glow against the dark and mottled background.

The walk is quiet. Too early for rush hour traffic to cut through the gentle chords of Joe Hisashi’s orchestrations filling my ears. Too early for the sidewalks to fill with people streaming out of the Metra station, sitting high above the ground. It feels like it’s just me, my camera, and the piano scoring my day.

A million seeds parachute from the sky, swirling and dancing to the ground where they scatter like the fallen down of a woodland angel. The smell of wood smoke wafting from chimneys has been replaced by the invigorating and hunger-inducing aroma of charcoal. Grilling. Fat snapping on red-hot embers. I follow the smell, tracing it to its origin: a backyard three blocks over, separated by a chain-link fence, the ground carpeted by an ocean of fiddlehead ferns.

I’m sorry to say I think I startled the poor griller. He flinched as I bent down to look at his ferns. We smiled, he waved, I asked for a quick photo of his greenery and he gestured his permission.

If only I’d caught them earlier in the season, I would have asked for a bowlful to take home and sauté in a bath of lemon, garlic, and browned butter. Crisp, cold white wine and parmesan wafers on the side. A bright red plum for dessert.

A vibrant sea of fiddlehead ferns, unfurled and captured mid-wave as they sway in the early evening breeze. The photo is framed looking through the wires of the grey chain link fence they sit inside.

I will miss Chicago. I was a different person when I came here and I arrived with little more than hopes in my pocket. No job, no friends, moved into an apartment sight unseen with the expectation that things would simply work out. I wish I could remember what drove me to place such an extraordinary bet on myself. To leap so blindly into the black, trusting that I wouldn’t fall.

I’m often reminded of a line from John Goldman: “I needed something when I came here… but I forgot to write it down and God knows what it was.”

This city, its people, the places I visited, have left a mark on my heart, burned its thumbprint into the back of my brain, and I will carry a piece of it with me forever. I will not miss the diesel exhaust, the rush hour train rides, or the constant companionship of strangers… but… there is an ache there. I feel a hole forming in my heart where this city used to live.

I pick up an errant branch lying on the sidewalk and play with it as I turn back home. The soft, resonant clang as it knocks against the metal spires of a wrought iron fence quietly echoing down alleyways and into doorways. I leave it in the courtyard — an offering to the peanut butter pit bull god of lightning.

The author’s former home — a Chicago courtyard apartment building, iconic to the city’s Far North. A concrete walkway running through its center splintering off on the left and right, leading to the separate entryways for each of the red brick building’s towers. Windows framed in white. Large, round, green bushes line the path.

My half-empty apartment smells like home. A combination of antique wood and roasting vegetables. Clean cotton and palo santo. It feels like warm flannel and fingers sticky from citrus oil. I wonder how long it will be before the new home smells like me. Will it ever? A house is much larger than an apartment. Will it come with smells and textures of its own, asking for my companionship in lieu of dominance?

What if it never smells like home?

I place my vinyl copy of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira on the dark wood Sansui turntable, dropping its needle and feeling the tingle of static pops dance in my ears.

“No regrets, Coyote…”

A hand gently caresses the album cover of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. Her fierce gaze captured by the camera, a moment frozen in stark black and white. A contrast to the warm, tan setting of cardboard boxes that surround her.

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