World Traveler Arrives in Fayetteville

Trisha Beland is a well-traveled lady. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she has returned there twice this year, and has also journeyed to Hawaii, Memphis, Ohio and Indiana, and will finish out the year with trips to New Orleans, Charleston and Florida. She has also visited Europe a few times in her life and has had a British pen-pal for fifty years. Trisha hopes that her next big trip will be to China to see the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the terra cotta soldiers at the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi and some of the places described in the novels of Chinese author Amy Tan. Beland is also a fan of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, and wouldn’t turn down a trip to Botswana.

Though Beland has circled the globe, she decided, along with her husband Lou, to settle in Fayetteville, and has been here for three years. After their retirement in Ohio, the Belands initially considered moving to the area because of family connections in Fort Smith. Trisha investigated other towns as well, but said, "As soon as I saw Fayetteville, I knew I could live here." She appreciates the beauty of the mountains, the small-town feel, the diverse population brought in by the University, and the many cultural opportunities available. Beland is a patron of the arts, and enjoys watching plays and musicals at the Walton Arts Center, the University theatre and the Arts Center of the Ozarks. Two of her favorite places in town are the Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings and, of course, the Fayetteville Public Library.

Trisha spent 25 years as an intensive care nurse, and says that her new profession seems to be "professional book clubber." She found book clubs to be such a great way to meet people that she is a member of two FPL clubs and another book club outside the library. Between all of her book club books and so many road trips, she utilizes FPL’s audio book collection quite a bit. She also appreciates the library’s reading spaces, coffee shop ("I think this library might have started a trend," she said), the programming offered in the forms of lectures and music and the fact that FPL is a "green" building.

A life-long reader, one of her earliest childhood memories is of being taken to the library by her mother. Beland believes reading is important because it is both enjoyable and it presents the opportunity to learn about people, places, times and circumstances that are different from one’s own life—"travel for the mind," so to speak. Her avid reading and yen for travel actually inspired her nursing career when she read a book about Dr. Albert Schweitzer. "I decided I had to be a nurse so I could go and work with him in the jungles of Africa," she said. She compared some of the virtues of reading to the virtues of travel when she stated that "Travel is good for the soul because it opens your eyes to different ways of life that you hadn’t even considered."

As important as being away from home is to Trisha, she does consider it vital to be involved in her chosen community. She is proud of the fact that wherever she has lived, she has always found friends and fun. "Bloom where you’re planted" is her motto. She joined the Newcomer’s Club immediately after moving here, and used that as a jumping-off point to discovering all that Fayetteville had to offer. Though she has only been here briefly, a friend recently called on her to acquaint a new person with the town. Fayetteville has been good to her, and she is happy to make others feel welcome here.