That steel city, damn in through the looking glass.

A quick weekend trip to Pittsburgh. My first city. Over 10 years later I still dream about the roads, the stillness and bitter cold of the bus stop in the early morning air, waiting to take my next adventure through this impossibly angled city, an intricate and almost inexplicable tangle of bridges and tunnels, hills and rivers and valleys, and so, so much steel.

36 floors up, to the very same spot where my husband first convinced me to follow him here. Now with our children. The turn my life took then.

And if we could have stayed? A parallel world. The grit and grandeur. The bricks and steep stairways and exposed power lines. My son framed in the doorway at the top of the stairs of the basement apartment we’re renting, the patterned carpet and wood and mustiness of an old home. And something it’s harder to put my finger on, quiet, a reverberating undercurrent of community, both humble and proud. Would we have lived this way too?

I will never love DC like I love this city, I tell my husband. How this place has shaped me.