Next week we will move to Syracuse and officially become a part of Michigan’s unabated brain drain. As a lifelong Michigander, I’m sad to leave my home state, but the best opportunities for me lie elsewhere right now.
After much ado, we will be closing on our house next Tuesday. It doesn’t quite feel real yet, but when I leave Ann Arbor on Monday, a memorable chapter in my life will end. Our PODS moving container will be delivered the same day that we close, and we’ll have a couple weeks to unload it. I wouldn’t have minded taking more time to load, but our situation allowed four partial days to do the job, and our pod was hauled away this morning while we were at work.
The 8×8x16 pod held everything that we wanted to have delivered; in the 6-day interim while almost all of our earthly possessions are in transit, we get to relax a little. It’s a novel sort of transient living situation in which we’ve pared down to the absolute minimum operating requirements for getting by, forgoing creature comforts (like a mattress!) but so exhausted that it doesn’t really matter.
I’m trying to make the most of my last few days in Ann Arbor, but I’ve lived here for 7 years and there’s not much that I’ve missed in terms of the “Ann Arbor Experience.” We’ve had late night breakfast at the Fleetwood Diner, early breakfast at Frank’s, and brunch at Angelo’s. We’ve tried at least half of the “good” restaurants in town at least once, visited the galleries and museums, gone on miles and miles of walks, visited at least 70% of the city parks (I kept a checklist for a while), enjoyed membership at the Michigan Theater, and taken in live theatre at the Purple Rose, Performance Network, and Gem Theatres. We’ve been members of the Detroit Zoo for years, seen more Tigers games at the CoPa on Jeff Daniels‘ season tickets than I can enumerate, gone to Top of the Park for average joe wandering as well as sponsor tent events and Summer Festival performances, seen too much of the Ann Arbor Art Fairs, pawed through miles of books in libraries and bookstores, and indulged in ice cream cones from Kilwin’s, Washtenaw Dairy, and Stucchi’s. There are plenty of other pleasant memories; life in Ann Arbor has been very good to us.