A friend of mine visited last weekend, and one of my favorite things about showing someone around Charleston is that I get to see the city through someone else’s eyes. Often when we live somewhere, we take things for granted, barely notice them. A fresh perspective reminds me to look at things I may see every day in different ways.
Rachel has a rather skewed view of the world (well, you do) and she always makes me notice things I’ve missed. Take our local soup shop, Ladles. I’ve been there dozens of times, and each time I go I walk under a sign with a ladle dripping what is presumably tomato soup. And never think anything of it. But, as Rachel commented right away, there are no soups quite that color red. In fact, the logo looks very much like a ladle dripping blood. Now every time I go I will be reminded of blood – a soup shop that could have been featured in Twilight. Not sure that’s the look they’re going for.
While at White point gardens at the Battery, Rachel got a big kick out of our statue to the confederate dead. Nothing unusual about having a statue on the Battery to the Confederate Defenders of Charleston. However, it is a bit strange that they are wearing fig leaves. As Rachel put it, no wonder the south lost the war if they were parading around in fig leaves instead of uniforms. I’ve walked past that statue every day on my way to work, and never thought anything of it. But it did make me wonder why. This of course made me research that statue and all the other military relics in White Point Gardens. Still don’t know why the sculptor depicted the defenders of Fort Sumter this way, but I did learn lots that I didn’t know about the relics there.
This is what a new perspective does for me. It stirs my imagination, makes me ask questions, and sometimes makes me question the absurd. I have always been one who wants to know why. Visitors make me question something I’ve taken for granted. They remind me to wonder about the commonplace as well as the unusual.
Christy Strick 