It’s interesting, isn’t it, how secretive I thought I needed to be in my “public” blog? In three years, I never said where I was from or where I lived or named names because I thought a confessional type of blog such as this required an element of privacy.

Then I realized that all the people I wanted to protect—my parents, my cousins, my friends—none of them read this. My followers are strangers. They found me on their own because something I said resonated with them. Over the years, I’ve shared this link with family and friends, and by doing so I’ve dared them to read it, and they didn’t. So why should I care anymore about sheltering their feelings or reputations?

The stuff I always wanted to write about was very regional and very personal. Baltimore, my adoptive city, the place where I lived through two marriages and one formative decade, can’t be compared to any other place on this earth. If I want to be real, I can’t be generic. I’m an East Coast blogger living in the Baltimore/DC Metro area and wishing I were back in the Baltimore part of that identification. I live in a safe, clean, and expensive suburb. When I drive to work and back, I cross the Woodrow Wilson Bridge between Maryland and Virginia. I can see the Washington Monument through my passenger window.

My hiking partner, the woman I cite in many of my posts, was my downstairs neighbor back in those Baltimore days. She left her keys in the door back in 2003, the day I moved into a studio apartment in the former library of a nineteenth century brownstone. She had left her keys in the door, and I knocked. We’ve been friends ever since. And now, you can’t take the Baltimore out of us.

There’s a whole lot going on in Baltimore these days, stuff that makes the news, stuff that indicates that a white transplant from rural Pennsylvania might not make it there. But I never went to Baltimore to “make it.” “Making it” was never my plan.