City Life

The view from my condo. The Fenway neighborhood in the distance. Those buildings were all built in the last few years.

The best thing for me about city living is that I do not have to drive. I think I always took it for granted when I lived here before that I can walk everywhere. And if I can’t walk I can take a cab or an Uber.

In Arizona, driving everywhere is pretty much a given. There really is no walking there. Of course people go hiking all the time but walking to run errands is a non starter. The roads there are wide and busy. Sidewalks were few and far between. It is also very hard to walk there because of the extreme heat and unrelenting sun. Seeing some of the homeless population used to make me very sad. Their skin was really burnt. There is literally no shade anywhere. We always looked for a tree in the parking lot but there were not many of those either. Some of the parking lots now have solar covered sheds so they generate electricity and you can park your car in the shade. Another reason you need to drive all over is that everything is far away. Tucson is so spread out! Sometimes I would be invited to a friends house and it would take over an hour to get there. And it was not in another city!

In Amherst a car was still very necessary. I could walk to downtown Amherst but you still need a car to run errands. Downtown Amherst is cute and artsy but for shopping you need to go to Hadley on route 9 and that is not walkable at all. Although I was impressed last year when they installed some sidewalks along route 9. Still, Route 9 is not a nice place to walk at all.

Here I can walk to Trader Joes or the Japanese grocery store. I can even walk over to Stop and Shop if I need to. The only time we shop in a car is to go to Brighton to Whole Foods. Today I even walked over to Urgent Care which is right around the corner. I wanted to get an x-ray of my ankle since I was worried that I had sustained a stress fracture. But the x-ray showed no fracture. Whew.

I just need to stay off the ankle for a while. I am walking too much.