VOICES
12
What I Love about
Houston By Chitra Divakaruni
I must start off with a confession. I did not always love Houston. When I landed here one June about a decade ago, after having spent many years in Northern California, I was shell-shocked by the heat and distressed by the flatness of the landscape. And the mosquitoes! They were even more aggressive than the mosquitoes of my Kolkata childhood. I remember turning to my husband Murthy accusingly and crying, “Good grief! Where have you brought me!” But in the intervening years Houston worked its magic on me. Just the other day I found myself saying to Murthy, “I’m so glad we moved here.” A lesser man might have declared, “I told you so!” My husband, being infinitely wise, merely smiled and agreed. What is it I love about Houston? One of the first things I appreciated about Houston was its affordability. In Houston it was much easier to find a great neighborhood with excellent schools that we could afford to live in. The
home we had in California was one-third the size of our home here, and still it cost more and was older and in constant need of repair. (I think many readers who have moved to Houston from other US cities might be smiling in agreement as they read this!) This left us with more money for fun activities for the family, such as eating out. Ah, eating out in Houston! I’ll have to write a separate article on Houston, the mega-foodie town filled with cuisines of all kinds, from Tex Mex, to Vietnamese, to Indian, to French, to Fusion! Once I began to really observe the world around me, I found Houston to be filled with surprising natural beauty. There are many lovely green areas here, such as the Arboretum, located conveniently off of the 610 Loop at Woodway, where one can stroll under the shade of native Texan trees such as Elm and Ash and sweet-smelling Magnolia. I still remember my children’s excitement when we spotted our first armadillo there, scurrying at dusk. The Azalea Trail and