29409 Aspen Drive

 

In early February of 1961, just a few days after my birth on January 29th, my parents brought me "home."  It was a little house by today's standards.  Small rooms, on the ground floor; a living room with a little area for a dining table (we never used it for that purpose except when holidays and guests arrived).  In the back a small kitchen with a door and window to the backyard.  Three bedrooms--believe it or not!  Two in the front and one in the back corner with a single bathroom sandwiched between that bedroom and the kitchen.  The furnace and water heater were in the basement.  The chimney you see is a false chimney, but at one time vented fumes from a little metal box called the "incinerator" that was located in the basement near to the furnace.  It was a state of the art way to lessen the burden of garbage disposal by allowing the home owner to burn the flammable stuff.  In the kitchen just off of the cabinet next to the back door was a metal door that open to a box with a metal door to the exterior wall.  Any guesses?  It was the milk-box.  Soon to be obsolete, but certainly another modern selling point. 

My parents bought this house in 1956 for the princely sum of $12,500.00.  It was paid off in monthly installments of $177.00.  By the time I arrived on the scene, both the incinerator and milk-box were no longer in use.  How quickly technology moves on.

In the upper left corner of this image, you can see the budding limbs of an enormous American Elm (Ulm americana).  When the homes in the neighborhood were finish, the contractors planted American Elms on the "islands" between the sidewalks and street in the first two streets adjacent to an older subdivision build in the 1930's.  It's streets were lined with stately Elms.  In this new extension, there were four parallel streets with one perpendicular street running up the middle.  Each street hosted on both sides about 50 homes for a total of 200.  There were three basic exterior designs, but all of the interiors were inter-changeable.  From the older subdivision outward the streets were named Magnolia, Aspen, Red Cedar and Tamarack.  The contractor ran out of Elms at my home.  The homes along Magnolia had Elms for the most part, and the homes from the cross street (Fields Road) to my house had Elms.  The Elm at at my home was the smallest.  Clearly a runt, an afterthought, a "here's hoping" tree. 

In 1968 a tornado hit Flat Rock, Michigan.  It breezed across my neighborhood and even more, swirled over my home.  Most of the Elms fell under it's power.  We were on vacation in Maryland at the time.  When we returned there was some minor damage to this house: the aluminum awning over the porch was ripped up and bent over the roof, the TV antenna attached to the chimney was gone, and a maple in the backyard was twisted so the it's trunk was split and had to be taken down.  But that little Elm was still standing.  Standing under it and looking up the block Fields Road and the other larger Elms was awe inspiring.  They were all gone!  All except one that sat on the island of the home one lot off of Fields Road.  Where once that had been dozens of magnificent Elms, there were know only two.  As we turned off of Fields Road on Aspen Drive, one things was immediate clear: now, there was just one.  I learned to love trees in this place.

We did some other driving around town.  I hadn't been here since my mother's funeral in the autumn of 1993, and I knew I would never be back again.  We stopped at the park on the Huron River off of Telegraph Road in what suffices for a "downtown".  We stopped in the newer park across Gibralter Road from the subdivision with the house I grew up in.  There is a new public Library there, sports fields and a little collection of rescued historical buildings from the town's early days.  It was really a lovely way to say a final farewell.

A view of the Huron River from a pedestrian bridge over it in Huroc Park.

Historic Society Buildings Preserved in Flat Rock, Michigan