I’m leaving in about an hour for Chelsea, Michigan, just west of Ann Arbor where I’ll meet N, a friend of sixty years. She lives in a northern Detroit suburb, and Chelsea is a convenient meeting place almost halfway between our homes.
We’re having a girlfriends’ sleepover, something we started in the 1970s when I was getting divorced and she was not. Over the years, we’ve met in many different Michigan and Indiana locales; but Chelsea is our favorite.
If you look the city up in Wikipedia, you’ll learn the basics about its history, geography, climate, and demographics. If you visit the Chamber of Commerce website, you’ll learn about its current economies, major industries, and nearby tourist attractions. But if you really want to get a sense of this charming town (the home of Jiffy Mix and its famous cornbread), you should visit firsthand.
Our favorite places include The Potting Shed, which doesn’t offer potting services and is so crammed with items it assaults the senses (But it does have the funniest lines of greeting cards); Zou Zou’s, a café that we have watched expand and thrive over the years and was named for Jimmy Stewart’s youngest daughter in “It’s A Wonderful Life”; and Bumble, a stationery and curio shop with a rabbit as its logo and the saying “Trust the Rabbit” as its motto. The rabbit has never steered us wrong.
We have our favorite eateries too: Coney Island, which is simply a diner; Cleary’s, an Irish pub, and Smokehouse 52, a barbecue place that used to serve the best frickles on the planet. Unfortunately, the recipe was changed after the pandemic, so we don’t trust the frickles anymore.
A special attraction to N and me, that is probably not on anyone else’s top ten list, is the local cemetery. Since Chelea was settled as early as 1820, you can imagine how old the earliest headstones are. That section of the cemetery includes large monuments as well as modest markers, all shaded by giant trees that create a sense of time.
There are other sections that are newer, where the headstones include photographs, etchings, and knickknacks around the bases. The trees are more like saplings and contribute to the overall newness of the scene. We take the few pieces of information one can glean from a headstone and weave stories about the inhabitants resting beneath it.
It’s Spoon River Anthology brought to the twenty-first century.
Leave a Reply