I fell in love with Tucson today. That means I’m now in a quintuple with three cities: Walla Walla (Eastern Washington), Greater Zion (Southern Utah), and Tucson (Arizona). I may be in love with all of Southern Arizona. We’ll see how the relationship develops over time.

Here’s how it happened! Actually, I don’t really know how it happened. My love for places tends to emerge after I’ve been somewhere for a little while. It’s like simmering cinnamon, vanilla, orange peels, and other stuff on the stove. You forget about the concoction, then suddenly the sweet perfume permeates your body. You can’t say which component you’re responding to because it’s not one thing. It’s all the things together.

That’s how it happened in Utah. I was downtown and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” came on the radio. I looked around and saw all the quaint little shops like MoFACo, which has since closed down, and the pawn shop that’s really a gun store but also has nice T-shirts and beaded keychains. The sun was bouncing off the Mormon pioneer-era bricks, accentuating their texture and calling attention to the fact that each one was made by hand.

I fell, hard. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t my history or that folks there didn’t really want me in that place, as a poet or as a human being. I loved it. That was that. I’d already decided I wasn’t staying in Utah by that point, but that didn’t make my love for the place any less real or enduring. I know I complain about it and can’t live there and find it extremely problematic on a cultural level. But I do love it.

Walla Walla was different. My husband and I had been out that way once during a major snowstorm, so we didn’t see much when we were there. We made the move there from Seattle on a clear, crystalline day. As we got to the outskirts of the town—Jon rattling along in the moving van and me following close behind—there were suddenly golden fields everywhere flanked by low-slung, heavily eroded purplish mountains that seemed to encircle a whole, otherworldly place, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I fell in love with Walla Walla then and there. I began weeping and calling my friends to tell them how immersive that landscape was. I think I even made some audio recordings to document the moment.

Tucson was a simmer, no doubt about it. We’ve lived here for four months. I didn’t know if I’d ever have that “falling” feeling replete with crying, full-body chills, and that distinctive dizziness I get when falling in any sort of love, even (or especially) when I fall in love with a place.

But it happened. Some alchemy occurred between the music on the radio, the landscape, the roads winding through wildlands, the people and their graciousness and their quirkiness and their fragility and their strength, the creativity embedded in this city, the smell of the grocery store and its worn concrete floors and its awkward layout and its enchanting shoppers milling about and the chip display and the meat- and vegetarian-meat display and the slightly sad produce and the immunity shots that were on sale and the children looking for their favorite healthy sodas and …

It just happened. Like that. Lickety-split. I know for sure it’s love because I’m all the way back home now, and I still feel this way. I love you, Tucson. I really do. Oh, now I’m crying again.