Saline native Dave Reid walked to school in town while growing up in the last house in the city limits, at the end of Willis and Saline Milan roads. After graduating, he walked to twelve-hour shifts at Ford on Michigan Ave. “My dad and everyone else worked at R&B Tool, and then the Ford plant came in 1966,” he says. Mostly farmland in his dad’s day, the avenue is now dotted with strip malls.

He met Diane DeNio, then an occupational therapist at Ypsilanti State Hospital, when she moved from Ypsilanti thirty-five years ago. They lived across from each other in barely 900-square-foot dwellings with steep staircases built in the 1880s on tree-lined McKay St.

They married in 1984, living together first at DeNio’s house in town, then, in 1994, in a 2,100-square-foot home in Valley View Estates, a rural Lodi Township subdivision built in the mid-eighties. An eighty-acre farm with a renovated farmhouse and red barn sits behind their house.

DeNio missed Ypsilanti’s diverse population and liberal politics. “There is more diversity now, but still a core conservative group, and sometimes there’s a lot of head-butting,” she says.

“Saline has growing pains. I think the town is overdeveloped,” she adds, pointing to Facebook complaints about city water. “They just got a couple million dollar grant toward the infrastructure. We have well water here and our water is clean. We pay for our garbage service, but people in town are just paying incredible amounts of taxes.”

She remains connected to the city. During the pandemic, she began making fabric masks and offering them at the Carrigan Café and other local businesses to benefit Saline Area Social Services. Now she makes potholders, frames, and other fabric wares that she sells at craft shows and the farmers market, contributing all proceeds to SASS.

Their living room holds neatly arranged bundles of DeNio’s goods. A memento of Reid’s service as an early morning volunteer at the now-closed Drowsy Parrot stands in the corner: the coffee shop’s carved parrot on a coat-rack perch.