Piedmont Park.

My brain’s a little fried lately, as when it starts to get colder and darker, I start to become a bit of a curmudgeon, scroll on Amazon looking for duvets. Even though I’m a November baby, I definitely live for the summer. I get cold easily, and when I get cold (maybe this is a universal phenomenon?), I get uncomfortable. And while it’s not exactly ever freezing in Atlanta, maybe hot and cold are relative. Maybe even after spending two plus years in Iowa, where the sidewalks turn to black ice and you can’t really walk outside without skating, where your windows freeze over and you have no choice but to become a curmudgeon—it just happens to you, no matter how friendly you were before—maybe even after experiencing a real winter, it is still somehow possible for Atlanta’s slip into the 50s to feel shocking. 

So yeah, I’m here, moving a little slower, breaking out all of my sweaters, plugging in my happy lamp, pretending I don’t have a budget so that I can buy myself a fluffy duvet. And while I’m reading a ton for school and some more for the class I’m teaching, I cannot seem to think about any of it specifically enough to write a blog post for this week. Maybe just this week, maybe this whole season—only time will tell. For now, I want to write about a park in Atlanta. Atlanta’s superstar park, Piedmont Park, because I was there last week, and I love it there. I love parks in general, maybe as much as I love TV shows and books.

Last weekend, I went to Piedmont Park for Pride. My friend and I went to volunteer with the bookstore Charis (another place I love), who had a table there filled with queer & trans books for kids. And that was important because we’re living in this very bizarre time where if you don’t like people groups, you can just pretend that they don’t exist. You can make it illegal for people to talk about them, for them to talk about themselves. And what’s scary about that (among many things) is that it so clearly indicates who holds the power. How can you feel threatened when you can make it illegal for people different than you to live out their differences? Are you sure that it’s not the way you’re wielding your power—violently, selfishly, exhausting to maintain—that’s making you restless instead of the people you’re wielding it against?

Anyway. I was there at the park for Pride. Kids were coming up to look at books that reflected them in a country that very much wants them not to see themselves in any mirror. And all across the park, there were tents and tents and tents, and I’m bad with estimating numbers but a lot of people were out there, queer people surrounded by queer people, at this park with its sloping hills and its stretches and stretches of grass. It felt like a whole world could be right there, a different one, where more kinds of people could breathe. 

I’ve gone to birthday parties at this park, where my friend sent out coordinates so that we could find it exactly: the hill among hills they were perching on. I’ve walked around this park with friends, while talking on the phone with my sister. When I first moved to Atlanta, I came here on the 4th of July, where a bunch of people were setting off fireworks willy nilly, and you literally had to dodge them to stay un-set-on-fire. It was as dangerous as the country we were out there to celebrate, but maybe because most of the fireworks-setter-offers were Black, I felt weirdly excited. Here I was in this city where I saw so many people who looked like me that I barely nodded in acknowledgement anymore. Something I always did in Iowa because seeing another Black person was like being reminded that you were not dropped down from outer space. Every time I came across a Black person, I wanted to hug them. I wanted to grab them by the shoulders, shake them and ask, What the hell are we doing here? My melanin is fading by the minute, so can you please point the way to Chicago? And now, I was here, in this park, so surrounded by other Black people that I almost forgot that we were rare. 

I love Piedmont Park for the memories I’ve had there. I love it for how green and stretching it is, for the little pond that looks onto the skyline. I love that you can walk the BeltLine (another Atlanta favorite) and end up in this park before you know it. That people walk around this massive stretch of green as if it’s nothing, and more often than not these people look like me. When I’m too tired to write publicly about art, I love that a park seems simple. You don’t really have to explain why you love it — it’s there. How could you not?