Melody Warnick's Blog

A few years ago I read a book about the Danish concept of hygge, which roughly translates to coziness or charm or, I don’t know, specialness. Hard to pin down and harder to say—aim for a Viking horn–like “HYOO-guh”—the concept nevertheless stayed with me for putting a name to a kind of cozy contentment I’d experienced before and kept trying to recapture, most notably at Christmas.

Hygge is the predominant emotion of the holidays. Nursing a mug of hot cocoa, gazing at the Christmas tree...

Dear everyone, you are cordially invited to come to my house for dinner.

For a while now I’ve been pondering how I can get more engaged here in my town, a subject that TBH I talk and write about far more than I actually do. I wanted to take action. At just the right moment, I stumbled across The Lovable City, a new initiative of the nonprofit Civic Dinners that I wrote about in This Is Where You Belong.

Even people who like to harangue each other on the internet may drop their weapons when t...

I wanted England, where my family and I went in May on a long-obsessed-over trip, to overwhelm me with its Britishness.

And it did, it totally did. We’re not exactly world travelers over here. There was a thrilling amount of novelty in BBC-style accents and a pocket full of foreign coins. Each strange new thing filled me with a giddy joy. Picture me exulting in the Tesco supermarket over little plastic cups of trifle and cookies called “Jammie Dodgers.” Oh, Brits, how I love you.

Then, almos...

For the past few months, the women at my church have been joining small interest groups—you know, like Meetups, but slightly more old-fashioned. Book club is an old standby, but now there’s a knitting group, a play group, a quilting group, a family history group, and so on. I was put in charge of the lunch group, because eating at restaurants is one of my core competencies. All I do is set a date and choose a place. As leadership roles go, I’ve had more challenging ones.

Who comes? Sometime...

Spring is awesome.

In early March I got a message from a reader in Calgary, Canada, who was like, “I’m really struggling to love my city right now.”

I said, “Girl, everybody hates their city in winter.”

It’s weird because some data from Robert Putnam suggests that levels of social capital are higher the farther north you go. The theory is that in the kinds of places that are periodically afflicted with polar vortexes, community members rely on each other more for emotional and physical support...

The other morning, as I drove home from a ridiculously early-morning class that I teach, I caught my neighbor, June, crossing the street in her robe and slippers.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m just going to put Betty’s newspaper on her porch.”

I knew the answer already, because I see it from my window sometimes. June scoops up Betty’s newspaper and drops it on her porch. The next day, here comes Betty across the street in her robe to do the same thing for June. They wrestle each ot...

As lovely as Christmas was this year—and believe me, eating cookies and bingeing The Final Table on Netflix satisfied the soul—I was like “BRING IT” to New Year’s. Fresh starts! Clean slates! Hooray!

That I sing this particular hallelujah chorus won’t surprise anyone who’s read This Is Where You Belong—but it may surprise you that I still, despite all the research, believe in my heart of hearts that there are moments when big change is indeed possible, and New Year’s is one of them.

I love s...

My Favorite Things 2018

Not long after I moved from Austin, Texas, to Blacksburg, Virginia, I met this beautiful blonde woman named Melissa at church. We started chatting, and eventually she mentioned that she ran her own blog. “Oh yeah?” I said, “What’s your blog called?”

“320 Sycamore,” she told me.

Friends, it was like realizing that Julia Roberts had been sitting in the next pew.

Long before I knew that Blacksburg, Virginia, existed, 320 Sycamore had filled my feedreader. That I’d ended...

Melody’s Favorite Things 2018

A few months ago on a work trip to Vermillion, South Dakota, I met a woman who curated her own holiday gift guide on her Instagram with cool products you could buy in her hometown. I’m pretty much obsessed with that idea. My book, This Is Where You Belong, is all about feeling happier and more connected wherever you happen to be living, and guess what? Shopping locally is a big way to do that.

This is totally not meant to be a guilt trip. When my beautiful friend...

Time heals all wounds. That’s why, if you’ve lived in the same place for a few years, you may start to say ridiculous things like, “Let’s move. It’ll be fun.”

I don’t blame you. I myself had forgotten how much relocating sucks until this past spring, when for the first time in six years my family moved houses. Suddenly it was like: “Oh. Yeah.” And I didn’t even leave my town! It was a mere fraction of the crappiness of moving to a new city!

Once I’d remembered how real and disconcerting all...