Friday, July 1, 2011

It's about loving the place you live

Life is a strange journey. Small changes and decisions have more impact on shaping your journey than you would ever suspect. Some life experiences are painful and some joyful. Some happen easily and some are like childbirth - s monumental struggle with your life hanging in the balance. I spent most of my life in California, but a sequence of events made it seem like a good idea at the time to move to Michigan. Little did I know how this place would get under my skin, slowly but surely. I don't know exactly how I developed my impression of what Michigan was like. It wasn't something I gave a lot of thought to, or had a lot of interest in, but in general, I thought of it as an urban area - Detroit, manufacturing, pollution. I didn't know that one day I would be able to hear the nesting cranes from my yard, have an assortment of spectacular warblers passing through in migration, have Pileated Woodpeckers in my yard, listen to the coyote chorus after dark. I didn't know that I would one day live 2 miles from a pristine river bottomland where Prothonotary Warblers and Cerulean Warblers nested, where I would come upon herons, turkeys, and owls sitting in the middle of the road, and where does could be seen cautiously moving their wobbly fawns in the middle of the day. Is it any wonder that I have come to love this amazing place - this weird mixture of wild lands and heritage farmlands - Van Buren County.