When Katie Dersnah Mitchell moved to Saline from Ann Arbor, she was looking to settle down with her soon-to-be-husband and start a family. Three decades and three children later, she’s done that and more, supporting hundreds of teens each year working at the Saline District Library.
“I did not imagine when we moved here that we would end up being farmers,” says Sarah Schloss, matriarch of the Schloss family. But life is full of surprises. Not only does she now co-own Nkids Farm, she’s also the cofounder of Washtenaw Meats, a company that partners with small southeast Michigan livestock farms and USDA-certified butchers to make meat processing and distribution more efficient and accessible.
In September of 2025, Michelle Balhorn read on Facebook that Sandra VanBurkleo was closing up shop at Artisan Knitworks and that all yarn and fabrics were 30 percent off. As a lover of knitting and crocheting, Michelle immediately ran down to the store with her ten-year-old son and started piling yarn into her arms. Seeing his mother with her arms full, her son said, “Stop buying the yarn, and just ask if you can buy the store.”
Located just southwest of Packard and Platt, this neighborhood now has a mix of housing types and sizes, as well as varying yards and various dogs and a whole lot of trees (we’ve even got a magical little forest on our west side).
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When Stephanie Clark and Hans Fruechtenicht had their first child, Claire, they knew they wanted to move back home to Michigan. (The two had been living in Columbus, Ohio while Stephanie completed her residency.) In 2013, they both landed jobs with the U-M—he as a philanthropy researcher, she as a physician—and made the move to Ann Arbor’s Dicken neighborhood. The west-side wooded enclave stood out as a place where they could affordably raise their young family.
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Right on the Old West Side, beside Argus Farm Stop, stands a century-old industrial-style building overlooking the train tracks. Once a manufacturing facility, it was given a new life when it was converted into residential lofts in 2005. Its brick facade stands in quiet contrast to the colorful historic homes with porches, peaked roofs, and tree-lined yards that surround it. There was something about that unlikely pairing that felt oddly familiar.
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If someone tells you an island exists in Ann Arbor, you’d do well to believe them. This island sits boldly between rushing Carpenter to the west and trickling Golfside to the east, roaring Washtenaw Ave. to the north, and thrumming Packard to the south. The beating heart of this island is Carpenter Elementary, and what better heart might any island ask for than a place of discovery and learning, friendship, and a grand grassy space for play.
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Amy Ramsey watches the sun rise over her neighbor’s field every morning. She’s up before dawn, a strong cup of coffee in hand, ready to open her barns and feed her animals. Wild Apple Farms is named for the centuries-old apple trees scattered across the property, and Ramsey strives to live in harmony with the land, respecting the rhythm of the year. “There’s a feeling of peace and contentment that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” she says. “If you pause to pay attention, you can smell the seasons changing.”
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On a September morning, Susan Kizer opens the door to the cheerfully cluttered brick carriage house behind her Main St. home. There’s a light layer of sawdust on her work tables, and wood of all varieties—from South American purpleheart to a maple burl she discovered in an antique shop—surrounds her. Anchoring the space is “Tinkerbell”—her nickname for the 750-pound lathe she uses to create her one-of-a-kind wood pieces.
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Stomping, clapping, and chanting—“Kona, Kona, Kona!”—thundered from the two front rows of the bleachers. The family, friends, and students of fifth-grade teacher Kaylee Harmon’s eight-year-old Shepherd mix cheered on the winner out of five canine contenders in Saline Community Fair’s Fifth Annual Dog of the Year Contest. Kona took home a first-place blue ribbon, plaque, and $150 gift card from Saline’s Tractor Supply Co.
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The Harts’ home, a “school bus yellow” Cape Cod with a huge garden, was the second one built by high schoolers in the Ann Arbor Student Building Industry Program, an experiential learning initiative. The first was on nearby Yellowstone Dr., and the third, says Donna, “is right around the corner, on Carl Ct.”
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On Hamilton Pl., just a few blocks west of U-M’s central campus, it’s standard to wake up to the familiar sounds of the city: passing cars, roommates, construction. However, at Tri Sug—a house shared by U-M students that doubles as an underground music venue—their morning starts instead with a loud meow from just outside the window.
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Marilyn Kirking says that the first time she and her husband, Duane, saw their future home in the Abbot neighborhood, “we didn’t even bring our checkbook.”
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I could’ve written another version of this essay and blown the entire word count just describing how the canopy of trees changes from season to season, or the way the maple leaves scatter sunlight across our chalky sidewalks in bouncing dapples.
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Steve Lesko and his younger sister Ciara attended Chelsea Public Schools, where Lesko played the violin starting in fifth grade. By freshman year of high school, he’d “burned out” on classical music and joined the Chelsea House Orchestra. That was where “I fell in love with Celtic music,” says Lesko.
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Case Kittel and his brother, Ross, were in the middle of the Au Sable River when Ross turned thirty-two. It was midnight and they were competing in the 2023 AuSable Canoe Marathon, a grueling, 120-mile canoe race that starts in Grayling and ends the next day in Oscoda. At midnight, Case says, he started singing “Happy Birthday.” There was another canoe near them; the folks in that boat “were like, ‘What?!,’” but they joined in the singing, too.
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Early one morning two years ago, Gail Kuhnlein left her beloved home in Pittsfield Township’s Hidden Creek subdivision for heart surgery and almost didn’t return. Kuhnlein, now sixty, suffered complications during the scheduled repair of a congenital defect in her mitral valve, and was in a medically induced coma for weeks before she recovered. When she returned two months later to the home she shares with her husband, Tim, it was with a new perspective on life. “This,” she says, “is all bonus time.”
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“I have the best of both worlds,” she says. “It feels like I’m in the country, but I’m close to downtown and the Old West Side.”
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Earlier this year, Kimberly Baker Crouch’s family sold the house on N. Fourth Ave. that five generations of Bakers had called home, and she and her niece Brianna Murphy moved to an apartment on Ann Arbor’s northeast side.
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When Marta Dabis first visited Great Oak Cohousing, she says, “I immediately knew that I had arrived home.” A Hungarian native and Zen Buddhist priest, Dabis says her neighborhood, where she’s lived since 2017, “feels like Europe inside,” with its colorful buildings clustered close together, community gardens, walking paths, and residents who know each other by name.
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