The latest drama was when my lawn mowing service (really just one guy) just decided to quit. No warning. No return of calls. He just ghosted me for some reason. After a week of this I finally realized the guy was not just behind schedule, he was not going to show. I thought about trying to fire up the old mower and do it myself like the old days, but my mower hadn't been started in three or four years and it was 50-50 whether it would start at all, and if it did it was 50-50 whether the engine would explode.
It has been a wet spring and the grass was growing half-and-inch a day. Many parts of the yard had reached 6 to 8 inches and I was expecting a harshly worded letter from the Homeowners Association any day. I posted a desperate plea to the local facebook group and managed to find a fellow who was trying to kickstart a lawn service in tandem with his 13-year-old son who was willing to come out on short notice, that very evening in fact. Of course, before he got there the rains hit hard, so it was put off a couple more days, but at least I'm not living in a jungle anymore.
It's interesting to note that previously I had contracted some work with a local firm that was run by a particularly entrepreneurial high school student who had built up one of the top local landscaping firms while he was still in high school. Apparently this kid intends to be the next in line.
Dexter is an excellent place for this sort of thing. There are plenty of big old exurban lots that need yard work and it's fairly wealthy these days so you can set a decent price and expect to get paid, which is a big concern when you are shoe-stringing a business. (You might be surprised at how often folks will arrange to have a small business do work and then simply not pay them, knowing that in a practical sense there is little recourse.) Dexter is also really focused on the local kids. The public schools are among the elite. Not only are they well funded, but there is a foundation that solicits donations to supplement their funding with private grant money (lately focussed on robotics, it seems). So there are quite a number of folks who will pick the local kid over a professional service on principle.
Really, if you were to picture a perfect example of the good, affluent, suburban life, you would probably picture Dexter. To read the police blotter is almost comical: a tool was stolen from an unlocked shed, a mailbox got knocked down, a bike was stolen. The worst things are DUIs, usually by barbarians from Ann Arbor, or an occasional domestic violence incident from one of the few remaining tiny pockets of lower income.
The various local social media (Facebook, NextDoor, etc.) are delightful, filled with announcements of local events and people reminiscing, "Why yes, I remember so and so, I used to live two doors down from them...", missing dogs found, chickens or cows that have gotten loose. On the latter, Dexter still has a sizeable rural component to it.
The intertwined issues of traffic and growth are the biggest complaints. Gentrification continues although sentiment to put the clamps on growth is waxing. A couple of new condo developments right in the heart of the village were controversial, but there is no arguing with their desirability; planned to sell at 400K they have been offer in excess of 600K before they are even built. As a homeowner, I am deeply prejudiced towards my property value increasing like that, thus my incentive is to fight these insurgent savages and their evil developments and keep housing supply limited.
The list of benefits is long -- outdoor activities abound on the trails and lakes nearby. Ann Arbor is 15 minutes away, itself often rated one of the best places to live in the nation. One hopes Dexter can stay just like it is forever, but nothing does. Disruption might come from hard times. It might come from a complete loss of rural hospitality and turn into one of those places where you can't live without a net worth of $10 million and everyone sues each other and all the kids are on oxy. Trouble, as they say, always comes around.
For now I'm just going to be happy to live in a place where if I'm in a tough situation, some 13-year-old kid and his dad will step up. Kudos to the is kid for getting (as Nassim Taleb would put it) skin in the game early in life. And kudos to those who created the environment where the kid can do it.
