Getting Somewhere

We started looking for houses. Obviously, being a city girl at heart, my first instinct was to consider actually living in Detroit. That notion was quickly dispelled, and we started looking in the Farmington Hills area because of a much more logical reason: church was there. We knew that we wanted to become involved in the same church my husband had grown up in, where his parents are active members and where we had many friends. Roots were what we needed.

Mind you, in this time, we hadn’t actually moved to Michigan yet. My husband started his new job early in the spring when snow was still on the ground, but we still had commitments in Evanston—namely, my son was in 1st grade and moving him mid-year wasn’t an option in my book. It was offered that my husband shack up with his parents for a few months until school let out. This bought us some time to find a house and then move once and for all into a permanent place. My husband would come to Evanston on the weekends, but often we would travel there to look, get the lay of the land and figure out where to live.

After being shown many houses in the Farmington/Novi/Wixom/etc., they all ran together. Every home we looked at was composed of late 1980s-early 1990s construction on streets that lead to nowhere and a held lot of beige and brass. Beige and brass, as we know, can easily be overcome, as can stained oak cabinets and hollow core doors, but nothing really felt right. I never knew what direction I was facing and whenever I asked where the nearest grocery store or post office would be, I always seemed to get an answer like, “out of the sub, turn left and you‘ll see a stop sign. Don’t go through it, but turn down the side street right before the sign and cut through the other sub, make a Detroit left, and the strip mall is on the right.” Huh? For all the subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, there were plenty of trees and little lakes, but these areas somehow seemed to play around with being in the country without actually being in the country. Ironically, this culture was way too foreign to us.

In a way, I felt like I had no right to be picky, but in another way, we were about to make an investment, so it at least had to feel a little right. Sensing my unease, and I think having a bit of his own, my husband wanted to see a few houses in the area where he grew up, further east in Royal Oak. Royal Oak and its surrounding suburbs are closer to the city of Detroit and by definition are more established communities. He wanted to know what the same money would buy in these areas with real brick houses (not brick façade), in neighborhoods (not “subs”), and in a city with its own public services (not townships with a volunteer fire department). So our agent started showing us homes in Royal Oak.

When my husband and I met and started dating in 1990, I swore I would never live in Royal Oak. Don’t ask me why, I’m not really sure. I was a snotty little kitten who slept on a cushy down pillow on the North Shore and had not yet scrubbed Levi’s in the bathtub or haggled for the only bottle of Heinz ketchup in the shop, but when we started going through houses in Royal Oak 12 years later, boy did my tune change! It was refreshing to be in such establishment, such as it is. (In Latvia we’d lived in communities established in the Dark Ages. Royal Oak was established in 1891.) Not only did the brick and mortar of each dwelling place feel more sustainable to us, but the whole community did. It even felt a little like Evanston without my precious lake.  We could build a life within these city limits that by Metro Detroit standards were pretty ancient. Now we were getting somewhere.