Home again, home again.

A rooster is crowing down the block, and that’s how I know I’m back in Oakwood, our neighborhood in East Lansing.

There’s not supposed to be a rooster. When my son and I petitioned City Council 17 or so years ago to allow people to keep chickens within the city limits (I had the fantasy back then that I might someday be home consistently enough to keep chickens), the subsequently-enacted law prohibited roosters. Of course. But in my neighborhood, people have always broken the law, and people have always cut law-breaking neighbors slack, so I’ve come home to a rooster.

Cape Cod was wonderful in all the ways. But there is an ease to being home, to hanging the laundry on the back porch, feeding the familiar squirrels, having my myriad cooking devices that save me from having to improvise. At Atlantic Spice in Truro, I picked up some orange essence, and tonight (after reading yet another gloomy article on what alcohol does to us in older age, sigh) I made myself a soda of that, Topo Chico, and crushed tart cherries from the farmers’ market. It was made easy by being back home to my homemade muddler, a one-inch wide stick with the bark removed on the lower half. Not bad.

Just down the hill from our house, the market is in full glory. Fresh sweet corn, tomatoes, carrots, unusual melons, fennel and basil, mushrooms of many varieties. Scott comes by to sell at the market now, and today I picked up more of his pork chops, which we had the other night with fresh tarragon from the back deck, finished with a sprinkling of lime juice.

I avoid eating pork of unknown origin because pigs are intelligent animals who suffer in bad farming. Scott lets his wander around the edge of the field and into the woods, uncaged and experiencing the seasons, and they live the proper piggish life as a result. The meat is fatty and delicious.

On the way home from the east, I signed up for a sprint (small) triathlon in Grand Rapids on August 10, mostly to get myself out on the bike and into the water more beforehand. It’ll be a little tricky with a week down to help Mom just before that, but I can make it work. I’m not intending to compete; just to finish.

Each year I think I’ll be mostly home for the summer, save swimming in Hyde Park, and I will Organize the House and help Keep the Garden and do a longer triathlon. But each year various needs take me away for stretches. It’s not a bad thing, but I’m not making progress on debulking our home in advance of whenever we have to downsize. Still, it always feels better to live than to plan (with the exception of dinner, where planning is half the fun).

And it is always hard to imagine someday giving up our house in East Lansing. We’ve poured so much energy and money into fixing up this 102-year-old belle, and I have the perfect kitchen for my kind of cook and hostess, the perfect bathtub in the bedroom under skylights, my office-cottage in the backyard (which has finally been fixed and can be reinhabited tomorrow morning for work).

Moreover, it’s hard to imagine ever finding such a neighborhood again – a place where I know all the people who live up and down our block and around the corners, a place where no one complains when folks grow squash in the front yard and let their backyards go to meadow, as ours has. No one thinks it distasteful to hang the laundry in plain view.

On Wednesday, the five-year-old who lives a couple houses down is coming over in the evening to make a birdhouse with Aron and me. His big brother and sister are off at sleep-away camp this week, and I asked his parents if they’d like a night off. Folks used to do that for us with our son.

One reason I can leave here often is that it is easy to go and easy to return. Not in terms of the travel – it’s actually ridiculously complex to travel in and out of East Lansing except for Chicago. But there’s always someone who will happily take in a package, water the container herbs and the birds, let me know if a contractor is parked in my drive.

Coming back, there might be a surprise rooster, but nothing substantial will have changed. People will still be decent to each other and share news of where the fresh peaches are to be found, who is moving into the house that was sold, and who might be running for City Council.

Built environment matters to how people feel and behave. More green space, less crime, and it appears the reason is people end up interacting more. Whether intentionally or not, this neighborhood, with houses built from 1910 through about 1927, facilitates interaction through most of the year.

Ours are houses sitting twenty feet away from each other with porches near the sidewalks; the places is dotted with pocket parks; it’s walkable to downtown and the university and the farmers’ market, library, post office, community center, and on and on. Even in winter, we see each other regularly as we shovel the walks, often helping each other out.

I remember when the city’s planning staff discovered “new urbanism,” which was basically our neighborhood plus modern jargon. For most of the last fifteen years, the city has seen our neighborhood as one to ignore and denigrate because of the scruffiness, the crowdedness, the fact that some of the houses are student rentals.

Yet the same city staff extol the precise architectural features we have and try to convince developers to recreate them, affordably. I always wonder if they might realize that what affordable new urbanism inevitably will get you is exactly what they don’t like about us. That someone will go and get a rooster and no one will turn them in?

In any case, I’m grateful to have found this place, grateful to have had the money to fix this house, grateful especially that my son got to grow up in a sloppy village of love, and that other children are now doing the same here. Our porches are presently a mess because I haven’t been around to keep them tidy. There’s another red squirrel trying to break into the house. The City Council race is going to rile everybody up. But it is a home.