"A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants. "
--Lawrence Durrell

I suppose this is an an excuse to ejaculate praise for a city which I have adopted as my hometown. Coming from further south, Ypsilanti was always an interesting town to me. When I first came to this smallish city for college my fellow students warned me that the particular burg I would spend the next four Falls and Winters in was something of a sore spot, a blemish on the paragon of civic enlightenment that was Ann Arbor. I disagreed. Wholeheartedly. The first time I visited Ann Arbor I was kindly asked to leave a lesbian tea house because they were about to parse some "feminist literature." When I asked why this was a problem I was given a nice-enough blank stare. A city which has always branded itself internationally as a beacon of tolerance and inclusiveness in the midst of the oppressive midwest, Ann Arbor struck me as a more self-important version of Hyde Park, an area of Cincinnati that boasted a spattering of decent restaurants that you might be able to gain access to if you mentioned the name of the mot centrist democratic candidate of that election year. That is, of course, if you weren't impaled by one of the innumerable upturned noses on the walk there.

Throughout college I got to become better acquainted with Ypsilanti through various cafés, house parties, and stupid mistakes, and I got to liking it. It was a pleasant enough place to live in. Close enough to Detroit to be able to sate my appetite for international cultural events, and close enough to relatively untrammeled tracts of nature that I could escape the urban malaise that was almost a prerequisite to keep up appearances with my neighbors. I loved it. Mike Jones has already eloquently brought to light the contradictions of Ypsilanti. So I don't have to. Suffice to say that I became overwhelmingly smitten with Ypsi during the Falls and Winters of my college years. So much so that I stayed in town after graduation. Much to the chagrin of my more practical-minded friends and relations.

So why the Durrell quote? I guess I truly fell in love with Ypsi when I fell in love with one of its inhabitants. There was an invitation to a jazz club. Then there was an indiscretion. Then there was an invitation to a movie. And then there was a shared cell-phone contract. And now there's a wedding date. Or something like that. The English literary counterculture of the early 20th century often penned essays about the importance of place, of a small space that one could be comfortable living in. Presumably this was a reaction to government housing projects that had sprung up in Britain about the same time. But I think they were on to something. If you can't find a place to actually become home in--to really "become home" in--to inhabit in all the senses of that word, then where are you?