Hometown Highlight: Grant, MI

By: Alex Angelini

Asking me where I’m from is a very loaded question, and could have a lot of answers based on what you mean. Where was I born? Durham, North Carolina. Where was I raised? Mostly Durham, but also a good amount of places in Michigan and Florida, as well as Franklinton, North Carolina. Where do I live currently? Mostly Winston-Salem, but once school’s out for longer than a week, I go back to where my parents live in Grant, Michigan. It’s a long story as to how we ended up where we are now, but this is about my hometown, not how it became my hometown. 

Photo Credit: Alex’s Mom!

Sporting a population of 987 as of the 2024 census, Grant was a city built off of saw mills and railroads back in 1882. While no longer the wood hot spot that it was, the railroad still runs frequently (when all the leaves are gone, I can see the train go by behind my house!). If you were to make your right hand into the shape of the lower peninsula of Michigan (pretty easy, as it’s the shape of a mitten), Grant would be about where your pinkie and ring finger meet, maybe a bit below. It’s a charming place, the kind you see in those schlocky Hallmark movies where the big business woman comes back home for the holidays and has some kind of magical Christmas that shows her the meaning of love or something. There’s only one stop light in Grant, and at 10:00 PM it becomes just a blinking yellow light. There’s a diner based entirely off of the train station that made the city what it was, a family grocery store with the best house-made brats, and a farmer’s market run by the apple orchard, all within relative walking distance from my house. 

It’s a funny feeling, living where my parents grew up and moved away from. There’s a sort of recontextualization to a lot of the stories they’d tell me of their youth. I can point to a spot and say: “Hey! That’s the place my mom used to hang out with friends!” It’s strange to finally see those places and compare them to what I imagined in my mind. For example, there’s this one spot, Yesterdog, that was a frequent setting for these stories of late night hangouts and cast parties and the like. I imagined it to look like the hot dog place near my childhood home, Jimmy’s Famous Hot Dogs, perhaps with a bit of that liminality lonely gas stations in the middle of the night have. Well, I went there just last summer and lo and behold: it looked nothing like that. It did have retro theming, like Jimmy’s did, but in a different way. Whereas Jimmy’s went for the aesthetic of a 50’s diner, Yesterdog’s was a bit more grungy, with old, faded, and rusted out signs and machinery. But by god, those were the best hot dogs I’ve ever had. And that’s coming from a notorious hot dog hater!

Grant is a place of anemoia for me, the feeling of nostalgia for a time you never lived through. Sure, I’ve visited before for a week or more during childhood summers when I visited my several sets of grandparents, but now it has more meaning. It feels like a place where I should belong. Everyone around here knows me because of my parents and people here smile and greet me like I’m one of their own. It’s a friendly town. I may need to take a week to adjust to it being home every time I come back, but it’s home for me. Just like Franklinton, just like Durham, just like my dorm at Salem. It’s home.

Photo Credit: Alex’s Mom!