YOUR ELi: The Season

Image: trillium blooming in the author's yard (with a peony shoot coming up to the right)

The weather. People all over town are saying to me, “This is the season to live here.” And it isn’t just the weather. It’s the quiet, particularly for those of us who live in the university neighborhoods that ring downtown.

The K-12 kids wrapping up school no longer having to fight the morning MSU traffic, there’s practically no wait for an outdoor seat at the restaurants and bars downtown, and the MSU students who are staying with us townies for the summer are out on their porches not in giant loud groups, but individually and in small clutches, peacefully swinging in hammocks and playing their guitars.

This morning, as I was biking back from Anytime Fitness up on Chandler Road—a gym now empty of young people, and only sparsely inhabited by us folks over 40—I was thinking about how one of the joys of ELi is the ability to tell people about opportunities they might otherwise not know about. Specifically I was thinking of telling people about where you can swim around here if, like me, you’re happiest in water outside.

And that got me thinking to what I love about being an embedded reporter for ELi: how it makes me mindful of what is around me. My work often takes me to other cities, and it is too easy to see East Lansing as the place where I flop, unpack, do laundry, repack, and leave. ELi connects me to the community I find it harder and harder to leave.

I’ve heard from our other reporters that it leaves them feeling the same way—with a deeper appreciation for East Lansing, a more active concern, and gratitude for the little things: the beauty of reflected sunlight on the graffiti under the Farm Lane bridge over the Red Cedar; the sound of Peoples Church’s bells; the juncos that visit with us twice a year on their migrations; the view of Venus out my back window as it shines its light through my neighbor’s giant cottonwood tree.

We are looking forward to helping you know and to love your town a little better this summer. And as always, we invite you to share with us the many-layered experience of being an embedded citizen reporter. There are so many reasons to do it: to educate the citizens and neighbors around you; to spread joy or concern about something you love here; to experience for yourself that mindfulness of place; and to provide a public service that is as local as they come. (To make a little money if you want to get paid.)

Or just read ELi. We like that, too.