Village Life: A reclaimed piano reclaims grace in a time of plague
By Jan Worth-Nelson Some days, no matter how hard you try to stay sane, it’s just too much. Picture me roaming around my house — a sprawling old place with several routes for pacing and hiding — where we’ve been mostly cloistered, like any reasonable oldsters shrinking away from COVID-19, since March. Picture me agitated, limbs sort of flapping, arms akimbo from time to time. Picture me muttering and cussing. Picture my pandemic...
Village Life: 26 miles on foot in Flint, Connor Coyne’s walk is both ancient and intimate
By Connor Coyne On a Sunday at the end of June, my alarm goes off at three in the morning. I dress in the darkness, putting on the loose fitting shirt and shorts I’d selected the night before. I’m careful not to wake my wife who will sleep for several more hours in the antiseptic breeze of our air-conditioned bedroom. I tap out down the hallway, softly lit by the glow from the bathroom nightlight, past my daughters’ rooms, and...
Village Life: Flint’s newest journalists are eight years old and raring to write
By Jan Worth-Nelson Paxon Laube-Clary’s head hurt. Stuck at home in pandemic shutdown, he was spending three to four hours a day of screen time keeping up with his classes at the Perry Innovation Center in Grand Blanc. His friend since preschool, Julian Pauli, home from the Flint Cultural Center Academy, was in the same condition. They thought it might be fun to do something different — something off the screen. So they...
Village Life: Of a big green chair, two bad haircuts and the Ministry of Silly Walks
By Jan Worth-Nelson I seem to have been sitting too long. Day after day of it. Day after day, for about 75 days now, obsessed with numbers, I’ve pretzeled myself into a big green chair too close to a glaring screen. The chair is sort of a comfort—it’s wide enough to accommodate the girth of me, widened by what I’ve come to call my “Trump Ten.” Okay, maybe it’s 15 by now. The chair is deep enough to make me feel safely ensconced, as...
This Month in the Village: April Features
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Village Life: one day of coronavirus means milk and bread, MiracleGro, Jesus and a cello
By Jan Worth-Nelson Not surprisingly these days, I’d had a restless night’s sleep. Sometime in the darkest time before dawn, my mind started obsessing on two things: bread and milk. Bread and milk, bread and milk. We have to get some bread and milk, my mind said, badgering me repeatedly, an urgency just shy of panicked. We can’t run out of bread and milk. I’ve got a really great comforter my niece sent us last year — a faux...
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