Lynn Terry

She’s lived here only seven months, but Lynn Terry has been Spokane-bound for nearly a decade.

“I’ve been moving here inch by inch for years,” says Terry, who made it official last November.

She began falling for Spokane when Barbara Tuttle, a friend for 36 years, moved here in the mid-1990s, Terry said. Frequent visits to the area cemented her feelings.

These days, Terry loves to sail on Lake Pend Oreille. She loves Auntie’s Bookstore and the local theater scene. She loves the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture. (She even joined as a member about five years ago.) And she loves the Elk Restaurant.

“It was exactly 13.5 hours from my house in Reno to the Elk,” she says. “Now it’s six minutes.”

Terry finished her doctorate in literacy at the University of Nevada at Reno in 2005. She taught there as an adjunct until last fall, when she learned the class she planned to teach that semester wouldn’t have enough students. At the time, Terry was visiting Tuttle.

“I thought, ‘You need to be thinking about doing something else,’ ” says Terry, 67. “That was the first of October. I was living here by Nov. 17.”

Why Spokane?

“I like the community,” Terry says, adding she is continually surprised by how friendly residents are. She goes on to say that when she called about city services, she casually mentioned to the customer service agent that Spokane’s street names and directions confused her. The agent carefully explained how the city’s mapping system worked.

“It is a very people-to-people city,” Terry says.

Real estate

Terry found a house a block away from her friend Tuttle in the Sunset Hills area northwest of downtown Spokane.

“I live in the trees and have a great view of downtown,” she says of her cliffside home.

The three-bedroom, one-story house built in 1963 was gutted in 2000, with the main living area redesigned to an open floor plan, Terry says. She plans to redecorate the bedrooms after she’s lived here at least a year.

Settling in

Terry is eager to get back to teaching and research, she says, adding that she’s comforted by what she considers the region’s abundance of professional opportunities.

“You don’t go through all this and not use it,” she says of earning her doctorate. “I really want to put it to use.”

Building community

While Terry came to Spokane with a longtime friendship in place, she is quickly adding to her circle of friends. Two people she knew from the University of Nevada have found work in the Spokane area, and another is moving to Moscow, Idaho.

Terry’s son, who married last month, lives in Boston, while her daughter is flirting with the idea of moving to Spokane, Terry says. “She’s moving here inch by inch, too.”