[Originally posted on FaceBook, Nov. 12, 2018]
This summer I had to make a choice: do I spend my available free time painting this house, or do I put that energy into work on local campaigns and issues that I care about? Well, I made my choice, and my neighbors will have to look at this half-painted, primed but not completed, house for a few more months. The campaigns didn’t turn out the way I had hoped, but no regrets.
Now it stands as the perfect visual symbol to the midterm elections and their outcome: we have unfinished business, and lots of work ahead of us.
More about that house, and how we came to live there: A couple of years ago my university job ended without tenure, and so I had to make a choice. Stay in North Carolina, a place I had no great love for, and look for other work within the same university; or move across the country for a temporary academic job in the same field? Instead we chose a third option: why not move back to my hometown (after a 23 year absence), reconnect with family and old friends, and see what options there might be outside of the ivory tower? My parents had recently purchased this fixer-upper, with the intention of repairing it and renting it out. They didn’t know it at the time, but their first renters turned out to be us.
So my wife and I sold our house in NC, and I arrived in Cheboygan with no plans other than a desire to spend time with people I had missed, and to do some physical work. And in particular I wanted to see what I could make of this house, a real diamond in the rough. Needless to say, it wasn’t your typical career move. Once you exit the academic treadmill it’s tough to jump back on.
In the summer of 2016 we thought we were just taking a temporary breather, enjoying the slower pace of life here to raise our daughter and reflect on our next move. But November of that year brought a major surprise: it turned out that we were really at the center of an epochal event. Places like Cheboygan – rural, economically struggling Midwestern small towns – put Trump in office with overwhelming support. How did this happen? It made me curious to understand the problems in our community better, because I (like Rip Van Winkle) obviously had no clue. And it also gave new urgency to my work on this house. I don’t know how to fix our town, but fixing at least one run-down house seemed like something I could do.
Our house is still a bit run-down. The paint is peeling off, and some of the windows need replacing. But that’s OK, because we live in Cheboygan. No one we know is trying to keep up with the Joneses. That’s one of the reasons we love living here. There are many other houses on our street (the same street I grew up on) in various states of repair, each family doing what they can to make it better. What are the stories they have to tell?
Micropolitan 