Neighborhood 2

When I first moved to Ann Arbor I lived on the Old West Side. I loved it there. It was separated from the student ghetto, but still right at the heart of Ann Arbor, and the neighborhood was full of character. I set out on a Sunday morning walk one fall afternoon, camera in hand, with the intention of documenting the place I lived and posting a tour of my neighborhood on my blog. I never got around to that blog post, though I still have some of the pictures:


When I moved to the northern end of town, I missed my old neighborhood. But over the past three years, I have come to love the place I live just as much as I loved the first neighborhood. It's different, but it has its own character and charm. It's grown on me, and I'll miss it just as much when I leave. Maybe more, because this time I'm moving across the country instead of across the city.

On Sundays I often take Jin on longer walks than normal. Today I went on my favorite long walk, one last time, and took my camera with me for another picture tour, of the place I've lived for the past three years. This may be interesting to no one but myself, but this is my home, and I wanted to show it off a little before I leave. I'm going to do a lot of talking along the way, and you can read it all, or skim, or just look at the pictures.


This is home. Our door is to the left, and to the right is the little grassy knoll that stands between us and Green Road (where Jin got himself hit by a car). When I chose this unit I worried a little about facing the main roadway, but it turned out to be a great location, quiet and secluded. I'd much rather look out our window a grassy ridge than the parking lot.


The coolest tree in Ann Arbor. Maybe in Michigan. And it's right on my corner. I am so lucky. (This is something the tenth picture I took of the coolest tree in Ann Arbor. I can't quite get my camera to do it justice.)


We're walking down Nixon Road right now. Whenever I walk along this pathway, there are elderly men and women, mostly Asian, almost all foreign, walking to and from their apartment and the bus stop and the grocery store. If I smile at them, they will inevitably smile the most wonderful smiles back at me and it always brightens up my walk. This man was no exception. When I passed with Jin he started (Jin is, after all, a big dog), and then gave me cheerful grin, and I grinned back and went buoyantly on my way.


They put this roundabout in last summer. The construction drove me crazy because I had to drive through it to get anywhere I wanted to go. But when I got back from three weeks of driving through roundabouts in England and Wales and Ireland and Scotland and saw what the construction was all about, it made me happy.


The flower mural fence. There's a daycare or home-based school or something on the corner and they were painting the mural right about the time I moved to this end of town. It's hard not to feel cheerful looking at the fence, so I'll give you a couple more pictures.



The fence stretches all the way to the end of the block. This section right here is kind of sad, though. The new wooden fencing is where the painted fence was obliterated. You can see two sections - they both happened within a week or two of each other. There may have been a fallen tree or a car accident, I could never quite tell. The older wood, nearest to you in the picture, is an even sadder story because it was never painted in the first place. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the owner of the fence in the house behind it never wanted the fence painted, and so until the other two sections of fence were knocked down it stood out, drab and lonely in a sea of sky blue and flowers.


And here's the local Kroger. It may seem odd to take a picture of my grocery store, but I become attached to grocery stores. When I first visited Michigan, I asked the girl I was staying with (she would later become my first roommate here) where the local grocery stores were so I could check them out. She gave me a funny look, but I shrugged it off. Everyone has their thing and this is mine. I really liked this particular Kroger, even more than the Kroger I went to at the other end of town.


When I was looking for apartments three years ago, I almost ended up here. I chose Windemere Park for several reasons, but as I was walking by this complex today I found myself wondering for the first time ever how things might have been different had Ashley and I moved here instead. I would have been in easy walking distance of Kroger, and the library (which was then under construction), and Traver Ridge Apartments, where I had several friends. But I would also never have ended up with Jin, because they don't allow pets.


And speaking of the library, here it is. I love the entire Ann Arbor District Library system, but this branch is my branch, and it's my favorite. It's architecturally interesting, very inviting inside, and it feels like it's at the edge of civilization, in view of apartment complexes and office buildings and wild grass and forest. I will miss this library very much.


This is the shortcut. My friend and then-roommate Jessica introduced it to me the first time I walked to the library from my apartment. It shaves a few minutes off the walk, and it leads here:


This is Traver Ridge Apartments. Well over a dozen members of our ward have lived here in the time I've been in Ann Arbor. I've spent a lot of time in these apartments, and they feel very familiar to me.


On the other side of the apartment buildings is a beautiful little path cutting through grass and trees and parallel to a stream and a pond. I discovered the path on a long run way back when I lived at the other end of town and something about it really drew me. It seems to strike at some memory that I don't remember having.


At the edge of the path there's this little playground/sculpture garden. I would really like to know the story behind itt. There's another one, almost identical, at the condominiums just down the road, and I've seen a third out in the Detroit area. I tried googling "michigan sculpture playground turtle traver ridge" and several other variations, but alas, nothing came up. Oh yeah, and the "turtle" part was because of this guy:



These are the condominiums where the other playground is located. If you follow the path at Traver Ridge it continues on to here, though it took me a long time to figure out that the path continued. I think it's very pretty and secluded, and Jin and I go walking here often.



And that brings us back home. This is the decorative pile of rocks at the entrance to my apartments. Jin rarely gives them a second glance on our way out, but when we return he can't leave them alone. There's something that smells really interesting in between the rocks, and I usually let him stop and sniff around for a minute or two.


I was talking with a friend several years back about being attached to places. "I don't really get attached to places," he told me. "I get attached to the people." I could understand the part about the people. The people who have been in my life here in Michigan are the most important part of my experience. But unlike my friend, I do get attached to the places themselves, to the sights and sounds and smells, and how they make me feel. Memories adhere to places and places adhere to memories, and it becomes hard to fully separate them. I will miss the people most, but I will also miss this place.