It’s really a saucer magnolia, magnolia x soulangeana, or tulip tree, or Japanese magnolia. This year in Flint they bloomed the last week in April, flamboyant and glorious when all other trees are still bare. Only the willows have begun to look like yellow-green spaghettini. One discussion in Flint this spring concerns community gardens: volunteers plant in the vacant spaces left from demolished houses close to downtown. Their empty rectangles rapidly greening in early spring reveal the outline of century-old landscaping. Dogwood pokes through vines and brambles marking the perimeter of a city lot where a house once stood. Although the old houses were multi-storied, the average city lot in the early twentieth century was small by today's standards. Ideal for planting.
By the first of May the Flint magnolias are past their best; the petals are falling and their glory is fading. They still overwhelm the weeping cherry, a more delicate and thoughtful tree, prissy when pruned into umbrellas. Here and there dense clusters of deep magenta poke through---crabapple? Near Hurley Hospital tulips stand erect and optimistic in front of an empty house, the red and yellow bulbs that have returned are large; someone tended the beds around the foundation not too long ago. Now the metal siding hangs askew, peeled back. Faux brick siding shows underneath, an earlier attempt at modernization to cover wood and avoid painting. They've survived another winter, these hulks of houses with their flaking paint, vandalized metal siding, cracked steps, sagging screens.
Urban decay now appears in the context of mortgage crisis. Commentators intone that we’ve gone too far with everyone wanting to own their own house, with becoming a nation of homeowners. What utter folly; we should have been renting all along.
My parents and their friends in the early 1950s were very tired of renting. During the Depression and then in wartime they had moved a lot. Family businesses were lost; colleges closed their doors when tuition could not be paid. They moved from hometown to jobs---and grateful to have them---elsewhere in the state or the country, to a navy port or army base, lucky when taken in by a relative on one of the coasts. Always room for another relative or friend in three-story houses like those now being demolished in Flint. Pillar to post, they said. “We met new people from all over the country, we lived in walk-ups with Murphy beds, not enough room to swing a cat, went roller skating on dates, dined for a few dollars in North Beach---wine included.”
After the war, what was there to go back to? A small town banker took a chance on a mortgage for a veteran. And so it began: decades of gardening, slow improvements---from septic tank to sewer, concrete steps poured with a neighbor, a room added on. No furniture and hardly any light (so it seems in the old photos), but enough space to raise a child and bring impoverished grandparents to live with them. I saw my grandmother's social security card recently; she and my invalid grandfather were saved by a postwar house. Those old Flint houses, many on their way to demolition, deserve respect. They did service to generations in their day; the least we could give their plots is a nice garden.
