The advice was simple: Bloom where you're planted.

When my husband, Ace, and our daughter, Jessica, then in fourth grade, moved to Pittsburgh 17 years ago (it seems like seven), we could not have found an area that would water, fertilize, weed and pick off any bad bugs better than Western Pennsylvania.

	Daniel Marsula, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger version.

If it wasn't love at first sight, it became love at first bite, when I became a food editor, first at The Pittsburgh Press and then the Post-Gazette. For that momentous change, I moved my second-floor desk 4 feet, and I soon discovered it was the right move. The day the PG bought The Press, I crept up the formerly forbidden stairs to the fourth-floor newsroom and for the first time was face to face with the friendly figure of publisher Bill Block. I knew I was back at a family newspaper.

The sale ended a long Teamsters strike, which had started on May 18, 1992 -- a day that was an auspicious anniversary Ace and I shared with Steve Twedt, the Post-Gazette reporter who first uttered the words "America's Most Livable City" to us. Steve, Ace and I had covered the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state.

And now, things come full circle, as we return to the Pacific Northwest, though we don't leave without taking a big part of this livable city with us. Though I must admit I've never felt like a Pennsylvanian, I have been proud to call myself a Pittsburgher.

I can't say I got off to an auspicious start. I started my job while Ace and Jessica, now 26, were left to organize the move from Seymour, Tenn., where we worked for the Knoxville News-Sentinel. I grew up in Michigan, where level land is divided into neat sections and "country mile" means something, and I felt hornswoggled by a city whose Golden Triangle had a Fifth Avenue that intersected with Sixth.

As a country girl's introduction to city living, I took a studio apartment in Allegheny Center. In my first day navigating the North Side, I stopped my little brown Datsun (memorable for its "I Brake for Chocolate" bumper sticker) to pause at an intersection. Someone honked. In farm country, people only honk to say hello. "How rude! Don't they see my Tennessee plates and know I'm new in town?" I wondered if I had made a mistake.

The very next week, a gully-washer of a thunderstorm hit the Boulevard of the Allies as I walked to the paper. A man on his way to the State Office Building opened his umbrella and took me in. I knew I was home.

In subsequent years, I've gotten lost in all the best places, and I've grown to love the crannies and the crooks and the natives who have greeted us in a friendly way. We have found both fellowship and family in our Swan Acres neighborhood and McKnight United Methodist Church.

It took a little longer to learn that if there's a parking place in the Strip or Oakland, it's probably illegal. I've had tickets and gotten towed, too, once from a Handicapped Only spot next to the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center long after it was closed. The person at the city's car pound was the rudest person I've ever met in Pittsburgh. Make that the rudest person in the six states I've lived and the 43 states I've visited.

Towing was terrible, but no more so than my ticket in Ross, where I parked in the same spot for three years while we watched our daughter play in Areta Kalogeras' North Hills Marching Band, but was ticketed the fourth. In Pittsburgh, parking is political.

Never mind. Just minor irritations in a city that has so much to offer. I love a city where dinosaurs roam and an Andy Warhola (later Warhol) could take art classes at The Carnegie, move to New York and become a household name. There is so much talent here, from the thriving community theater scene, including our own McKnight Players, to the international headliners who make stops at the region's many venues.

And we were 15 minutes from it all.

I admire a citizenry that shortens the tongue-twisting Monongahela to the Mon and never-fit-in-a-headline names like the official name of the History Center. Of course, we're used to shortcuts: Big Ben, S'Liberty, The Tubes, The Bus.

Our out-of-state friends have compared our city favorably to San Francisco, and who could argue, standing at the top of the Duquesne Incline as day turns to night and the Golden Triangle sparkles and struts like so many stars. That viewpoint is where we once heard a tour guide say that the Steelers football stadium "belongs to H.J. Heinz, of course."

We love to gaze at PNC Park, where we have had our hearts broken so many times, and we've loved walking across the Roberto Clemente Bridge on game day. I love my husband, but if he ever spurns the Steelers for the Seahawks or doesn't root for the Pirates against the Mariners in the World Series (don't laugh -- anything is possible), we are through.

Being a food editor is about the best job I've ever had. Pittsburgh is a great food town with wonderful new restaurants. I've appreciated the rich ethnicity of this city, but even more, I've admired the people who create food with such love and sense of their roots. I have learned about Ramadan, Chinese New Year, Passover and Orthodox Easter through the healing faith of food. And some think I'm the one who wrote the book on The Pittsburgh Cookie Table.

I've eaten pawpaws and ramps, haluski and green salads with fries, and no one visits us without a Primanti's sandwich. I relished a garlic and chocolate party (my pores have never reeked with such pungency), eaten a fresh strawberry in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania and made a raspberry trifle from homegrown berries. I watched produce unloaded at the Terminal Market at midnight, saw a delightful Frenchman turn a pile of butter into croissants at 2 a.m., scampered with the sheep in two counties and watched cows milked at 3 a.m. I got to ride shotgun on the Heinz Hitch, and, if I had a disappointment, it was not being allowed to run with the pierogies at a Pirates game.

So much has happened since that first day I walked through Gateway Center and admired the flowers. Department stores have come and gone (bless that Horne's clerk who let me take bags of children's clothes home for a tomboy daughter to try on). We may soon be on Plan Z for Fifth and Forbes (give me the Market Square's Thursday farmers' market and foot-tapping lunch music any day). We have artisan bread and farmers' markets, and there are more reasons to go through tunnels and over bridges than ever before. Phipps Conservatory & Botanical Gardens has a new face (my husband loved his giant garden hedgehog).

One of the best changes is how PPG Plaza has become a center for family fun amid the spires of the city. In winter, what we gleefully call the Tomb of the Unknown Bowler (for those black balls that support the obelisk) becomes a Christmas tree stand surrounded by a skating rink.

In the summer, the fountain spurts and spins and sputters to the delight of old and young alike. Diversity, thy name is the cooling water of a spontaneous shower.

Ace and I have treasured our "Mondays with Monty" writers group at Pitt, and we have had love letters from supporters and hate mail from detractors. The good outdistanced the bad by a country mile.

If I haven't loved every minute, there wasn't a day when I wasn't happy to answer the wake-up call of the editor I sleep with, my husband, Ace. And if I didn't bounce out of bed, at least I was smiling by the time my Saturn pulled into the parking lot for another day of being a newspaper woman. To this day, the ink has never left my veins.

Our daughter still thinks of herself as a Pittsburgher, and The Cookie Table her God-given right. This month, Jessica, in her first management job as a Girl Scout camp director, faced a challenge when the camp cook got angry and walked out between lunch and dinner.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"My assistant and I went into the kitchen and cooked dinner," she said, then asked me for a cookie recipe.

Thanks, Pittsburgh, for passing on your work ethic.

Last Wednesday, I stood on the steaming sidewalk (it's not true that you can fry eggs when it gets this hot) of the Boulevard of the Allies and watched the presses roll. That's our Food section, I thought, as proud and happy as I was the first day I realized I was meant to be a reporter, a writer, and I hope a friend to people who cook and who read.

I have felt privileged to work for a family newspaper that cares about its readers.

At the recent memorial for Bill Block, I happened to take a pew in Heinz Chapel by a stained glass window that symbolized this newspaperman, and us all. A message on the window said: "Seek the truth, the truth shall make you free."

That very day, at the PPG fountain, I saw a beautiful rainbow reflected in the water of the fountain in the square that Pittsburgh people built. I consider it a sign.

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Blueberry-Macadamia Goodbye Cake

This farewell cake has three beloved ingredients -- butter, blueberries from a farmers' market, and macadamia nuts from Hawaii.

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
  
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  
• 1 cup butter, at room temperature
  
• 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
  
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
  
• 1 teaspoon grated orange rind
  
• 2 large eggs
  
• 1 cup sour cream
  
• Blueberry filling, see recipe below
  
• Topping, see recipe below

Stir flour, baking powder and soda. In an electric mixer, at medium speed, beat butter, sugar, vanilla and orange rind. Beat in eggs one at a time, then sour cream. At low speed, gradually beat in flour mixture until blended.

Turn about 1/3 of the batter into a greased and floured 9-inch tube pan. Sprinkle with 1/2 the blueberry filling. Repeat layers. Spread with remaining batter. Sprinkle with topping. Bake on the rack below center, in a preheated 350-degree oven until a cake tester comes out free of batter -- about 50 minutes. Loosen edges and turn out on rack. Cool completely. Invert on a cake platter.

Blueberry filling: Mix 2 tablespoons sugar, 1 cup blueberries and 1/2 cup chopped macadamia nuts.

Topping: Mix 1 tablespoon sugar and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon.