In Flint, Michigan:
As the veteran of a brutal San Francisco home-buying odyssey, there’s no denying the appeal of a place where desperate Realtors sometimes offer up houses by the dozen. But this is more than a quest for cheap housing. I have an almost unhealthy attachment to Flint. I want to do something—anything—to help my hometown. Maybe a “summer place” in what has been ranked one of America’s most depressing cities can pump a little life into the local economy. And I fear that after 15 years in San Francisco—sometimes described as 49 square miles surrounded on all sides by reality—I’m losing touch with my roots, drifting uncomfortably far from the factory town my grandparents moved to at the turn of the 20th century.
How do I know this? Sometimes I fret about the high price of organic avocados. After growing up driving a Buick Electra 225, I now own a gutless four-cylinder Toyota Camry. And then there’s the fact that I’m so jittery in the place where I grew up that I’m sleeping with a bat.
There are some good neighborhoods there still, I think, it’s close to recreation up north (though Saginaw and Bay City more so) and it’s cheap living, if you can work from anywhere. Of course, you could even live up north (though the winters are tougher there than southeast Michigan). On the other hand, there are the Michigan taxes…
Michigan has real winters, at least north of St Johns. That Detroit stuff is just kidding.
Winter is supposed to have SNOW.
As I live just a bit east of San Francisco, I will testify that the grip on reality here is somewhat tenuous, though occasionally better than SF. Our unicorns run to single individuals, not herds.
Are those pink, green or psychedelic unicorns?
“Michigan has real winters, at least north of St Johns.”
Being from Alma, I’d have to say that winters seemed to drop off after the 1960s for some reason. I remember many years where there were snow forts all along the street (in the snow drifts thrown up by the plows). In the 70s, though, I don’t remember many snows like that — although there was one in early ’78 that buried many a car in the East Lansing apartment complexes.
I always thought of Clare as the “frost line” — for one thing, it was where the national forests all seemed to start (going northwest, on the way to Traverse City), and getting there meant that we were nearly all the way to Houghton Lake and either Tip-Up Town or the summer-time party & trade show that Mort Neff threw there…
Good times 🙂