The thing that resonated so with students is that Linda shared the ability to understand the spirit of this place here in southeast Michigan, land of lakes and green fields and woods; bad roads with racing drivers who can then surprise you with their courteousness; uninspiring strip malls that turn out to contain delicious restaurants run by people who have emigrated here from India or China, Bulgaria or Syria, Russia or Germany. They have all come here—to make this part of Michigan their home. They are all part of what makes this place special. This includes the people who’ve been here from the start – the Ojibwe and Kickapoo and Fox–– as well as the French and English and Irish and other Europeans who came in the 1700s and 1800s and 1900s; the African Americans who came here during the Great Migration in the twentieth century, fleeing the Jim Crow south; the Yemenis and Iraqis, Chaldeans and Lebanese who have come seeking shelter from war and persecution. All of us, all together. I’ve never lived in a place where so many people from so many different backgrounds feel such a deep attachment to their homes, where they feel alive to the specialness of the place. My own tribe (academics, travelers, East Coasters) are migrants – we move around the country, and even the world, with a restlessness that people here don’t have. They might have had it in order to get here, but having arrived, many of them seem to have let it go. They live here, and settle, absorbing the spirit of place that Linda understood so well.
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