Curt Winans describes his wife Menuka as “a magnet” for people. When she moved to Chelsea in 2016 from Kathmandu, Nepal, with her eighteen-month-old daughter Melisha, she didn’t have a driver’s license and didn’t speak English well. But that didn’t stop her from getting to know her new town—and the people in it.

“I would push Melisha in her stroller, even through the snow,” says Menuka, who lives with her family in a circa-1900 home decorated with a string of Nepalese prayer flags a couple of blocks from downtown’s Main St.

“We walked everywhere,” she says, from the South Meadows Elementary School playground to the Chelsea District Library, where they met new friends. They also frequented downtown businesses. “I love to go to the small markets like at home [in Nepal],” she says. The Chelsea Farmers Market and Agricole Farm Stop are favorites.

The Winans met in Abu Dhabi in 2010 when both were there on work visas. Curt, a boat builder by trade, was working a five-year stint converting a frigate into a yacht, when he went for coffee at a Starbucks and Menuka “popped up from behind the counter,” he laughs. They struck up a friendship, and after Curt moved back to the U.S. to help care for his aging parents, they kept in touch by Skype, phone, and email. In time, the friends became a couple, and soon after mother and daughter arrived in the U.S., Menuka and Curt were married at the Chelsea Depot at a small gathering of friends and family. Curt adopted Melisha and both she and Menuka are now U.S. citizens. Menuka got her driver’s license, graduated from Washtenaw Community College, and works at Chelsea Hospital.

Curt, who grew up on Park St. in Chelsea, has kept himself busy too: He’s renovating the house next door, which the longtime owners sold to him in spring 2020. Both homes have been in the Winans family for generations: They were once owned by twin brothers Albert and Elbert Winans (Albert was Curt’s great-grandfather). Curt’s older brother, John, who’s since passed away, used to live in Curt and Menuka’s current house. As the pandemic house project next door takes shape (so far, Curt has gutted it, repointed the foundation, reframed, added a bedroom, and painted the outside), Melisha, age eight, likes to stop by after school to check on her dad’s progress. 

But she has other favorite pastimes, too: “I love to go to Timber Town,” Melisha says of the popular wooden playground on Chelsea’s north side. She also smiles when she recalls her fifth birthday, when, during Covid restrictions, a Chelsea fire truck made a special stop at her house to deliver a pepperoni pizza and pink teddy bear.

It’s “those little things” that Curt says make him “feel really good about being right here.”