Falls Church Aint So Bad...

It's no secret that Falls Church is not my favorite place on the planet. Sometimes, I feel bad for feeling the way I do about it. It's really a perfectly good town. It's close to downtown D.C. It has every store you could possibly need to manage a family of four. It's easy to find your way around. It even has something of a charming downtown (sort of). It's close to FSI, meaning that Stefan is never too far away from home to save me from a baby crisis. It's fine. Totally fine. But it's not at all inspiring. I feel like I am one of those uninspired people who needs to be in an exciting place in order to feel interesting and that's my shortcoming, not Falls Church's. Anyway, point being, I often complain about living here, but this weekend, I actually had a moment of feeling lucky to be here.

We are a family of walkers, born largely from necessity. Having the dogs means that we have to walk and if we can combine that with getting something else done, it's ideal. We often walk to the various playgrounds in the area, which is what we initially set out to do yesterday morning. We also wanted to hit the Falls Church Farmers Market later in the day. In a flash of genius, we realized we could do all those things in one walk. So, we left the Oakwood and meandered through the back streets of town until we arrived at the market. I have to say, it's a pretty legit Farmers' Market. I think I recall seeing somewhere that it was named, "America's Favorite Market," by whom I have no idea, but it seems like it could be possible. It has everything you could possibly need without any "fluff." We bought croissants to snack on while there. I got a pile of wild mushrooms, the likes of which I haven't seen since Northern California. There's a happy bouquet of zinnias in our single, striped Oakwood vase. We have apples, pears and nectarines to last the week. And when we were done with the market, we made our way over to the Cherry Hill Barn and playground, where Adela burned off some Toddler energy. It was like, an absolutely perfect morning.

As I looked around at the families at the playground, with their bulging bags of produce and their super happy children, I thought to myself, "This is why people live here." And it made perfect sense to me.