Dear Homewood,

Happy 100th birthday. You were born in 1926, stitched together from Edgewood, Grove Park and Rosedale, and a century later, you have never looked better. If I could fit a hundred candles on a cake, I would. The fire marshal might object.

Last week, I walked your sidewalks during the Holiday Open House, and it felt like your birthday party. The shop windows on 18th Street glowed like little lanterns. White lights wrapped the trees and spilled across the bricks. Someone handed me a cup of hot cider, someone offered me a cookie I did not need, which I ate anyway, and a stranger in a reindeer sweater wished me a merry Christmas. I am a Muslim from Damascus, and I wished her a merry Christmas right back, with all my heart.

Since it is your birthday, I want to confess something.

I love you, Homewood.

I have loved you for nearly four decades, through a marriage and a divorce, three children and a pile of birthday cakes, a move away and homecoming. When I left for New Jersey, I missed you the way you miss a person. When I came home, you took me back as if I had only stepped out for groceries.

Why are you so appealing? Everyone wants to live here. Houses on your streets sell before the “For Sale” sign settles into the lawn.

Maybe it is your sidewalks, where you cannot walk a block without stopping to talk. A ten-minute errand takes an hour, and nobody minds. Maybe it is your dogs, who outnumber the people and are better dressed. Maybe it is the strollers parked outside every coffee shop like a valet line for babies.

Maybe it is O’Henry’s, where I write most mornings and where the barista starts my coffee when I walk through the door. Maybe it is Little Professor, the bookstore that still smells like paper and possibility. Maybe it is the library, where my children learned to read and I learned to love quiet.

Maybe it is Shades Creek, winding through your greenway like a lazy brown ribbon, carrying joggers and herons and the occasional runaway Frisbee. Maybe it is Central Park on a Saturday, soccer moms shouting, kids rolling down the grass, fathers pretending they are not tired. Maybe it is Friday night under the stadium lights, the band and the Patriots on the field and the whole town in the stands. Maybe it is your schools, which parents speak of the way Syrians speak of their mothers’ cooking.

Or maybe it is simpler. Maybe it is the people.

My neighbor, who brings pound cake for no reason. The man at the grocery store who calls me “boss.” The friends I have made over all these years, who ask about my mother’s recipes and my children’s lives and then actually listen to the answers. In a world that sometimes asks where I am really from, you simply ask how my day is going.

Yes, once in a while, someone here still squints at my name, or a word slips out meant to remind me I am a guest. A “terrorist” muttered at a party. A “go back where you came from” tossed from a passing truck. Those words sting, and they always will. But they are a few drops of vinegar in a pitcher of sweet tea. Nearly four decades of pound cake, waves from porches and friends who show up have drowned them out. Not one of those words has ever convinced me I do not belong here.

You are not perfect, and at one hundred, you are still learning to love every one of your neighbors equally, no matter where they come from or what faith they carry. But you are trying, and so am I, and that is what love looks like after a while.

As the open house wound down last week, I stood on 18th Street and watched the lights flicker in the windows like birthday candles, the cider steam in my cup, the last carolers singing off-key near the corner. I felt the warm, simple certainty of a man standing exactly where he should be.

Happy birthday, Homewood. You gave this immigrant a place to belong.

With love, always,

Karim