A few weeks ago I posted the following on my Facebook wall:
I wrote it after spending a few days in Grand Rapids, Michigan with my sister Susan. They were possibly the most fulfilling days I’ve had on a trip back to Michigan since I moved to Colorado six years ago. In fact the entire three weeks I spent in Michigan this past May were the most fulfilling weeks I’ve spent in Michigan since I moved to Colorado.
It’s because I made the decision when I stepped off the plane in Grand Rapids to treat the trip as if I were somewhere brand new. To explore, relax and re-discover in that very familiar place.
Here’s what I found:
Grand Rapids’ East Town community, where Susan and her husband live, is as totally rad as all the hipsters who call that area home. Susan and I spent two days walking around the leafy tree-lined streets, stopping into shops like Art of the Table where locals can pick up everything from peanut butter made in Grand Rapids to tabletop accessories to chocolate and artisan cheeses. They also carry a selection of local-made beers and wines. We shopped for Indian cooking spices and browsed their unique selection of cookbooks. I left wishing there was a shop like it around the corner from my own apartment in Vail.
We browsed through a couple of Susan’s favorite consignment clothing stores to see what gems we could find, and though our search yielded nothing that day, Susan assured me that’s not always the case.
One afternoon we grabbed a bottle of Layer Cake Cabernet and a wheel of brie for a snack from Martha’s Vineyard, East Town’s friendly neighborhood wine and spirits shop. Then we picked up a take-out sampler plate from GoJo’s, an Ethiopian restaurant, and feasted on spiced chicken and lentils, sopping up our watt (Ethiopian-style stew) with lots of injerra (a pancake-like flatbread). It’s a meal I’m still lusting over.
It was a thoroughly satisfying couple of days and, if nothing else, just nice to be out of the mountains and in a city for a moment (not that I’d trade my mountains for Grand Rapids, but it is enjoyable to crawl out of them every now and again and see what the rest of the country is seeing, eating and doing). I expressed my satisfaction to Susan and she shrugged off my compliments to her city, saying it seems quite small to her now, after living there for a couple years. I guess I can see her point (Although I’ve always been a small town girl and any place with more than two different coffee shops is a city to me), but, really, big city or not I was charmed by Grand Rapids on this trip.
I was also charmed by South Haven.
With its beaches and lakeside condos it’s easy to be charmed by my hometown. That is, if you didn’t grow up there.
It’s taken me a little more time than some (twenty-something years) to get here because I had to figure out how to separate the issues I have regarding my hometown, like hating high school and other issues relating to awkward teenage dramatics, from the charm of the town—I had to learn how to not hold those things against it. I worked especially hard on this during this last visit, and discovered a lot of cool stuff along the way. But scraping away high school angst is a tedious and time-consuming job, so that, my friends, is another story for another time.
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