50 States in 52 weeks, Michigan - the land that bore(s) me

I was born in Michigan, very early in the morning, over 24,000 mornings ago. I fled the state after high school, when I left there were signs along the highway urging the last person to leave Michigan to please remember to turn the lights off. I was born there, but I no longer consider it home, I haven't for decades.  None of my immediate family live there, a couple of distant cousins live in the Detroit area. Most of my close family are buried in a country cemetery, a mile down the road from the house I grew up in. I have tried and failed to give away a cemetery plot there.  

As Doc Spo describes it, Michigan can be the land of perpetual snow and ice. The summers can also be oppressively hot. 

Michigan is easy to pick out on a world map, it surrounded by massive freshwater lakes, really inland seas. The lower peninsula is shaped like the back side of your left hand. The farm I was raised on is in the middle of your thumb, about 75 miles north of the first knuckle. My grandfather bought 80 acres out there in the middle of World War II for a song, my parents moved to the farm about 5 years before I was born. 

My paternal grandfather moved to Michigan, because Ford was paying the remarkable wage of $5 a day, and his family was barely scraping by on a farm north east of St. Louis. My paternal grandmother arrived in Detroit, because her father was digging tunnels under the Detroit River and out under Lake Huron (drinking water inlets.) My mother's family moved to central Michigan in the early 1800's to farm in the fertile Saginaw Valley. 

The landscape of Michigan was scraped and contoured by the last ice age. Early settlers harvested timber that built much of the midwest and farming was and still is a dominant way of making a living. The American Auto industry flourished in the Michigan, until the 1960's. Detroit is a shadow of the city it once was. The great lakes have sandy beaches, rocky shores. Much of northern Michigan is still wild. Parts of the state are very pretty. 

I am glad to say I am from there. I have no desire to move back there.