The State Of Eternal Autumn

 Mott Park

During the second week of September, I picked up my wife at Bishop International Airport in Flint, Michigan, and we spent some time afterwards viewing the industrial ruins of Flint and some of the Flint work of the architect Alden Dow, member of the Dow family of Midland, Michigan and Dow Chemical.

In particular, there was a house on Nolen Drive that at one time in the dim past was featured in LIFE magazine as a house of the future with a kitchen similarly of the future.
The neighborhoods in Flint are surprisingly close together for most of us suburbanites. Nolen Drive is merely a hen's race from the spot where the massive "Chevy In The Hole" Chevrolet Flint complex used to be.

The Flint River which flows serenely through Mott Park across the street on Nolen Drive also flows throw Chevy In The Hole, girded and cinctured, however, in channels and banks of concrete hardly 1/2 mile away.

What struck me most was the coloring of the flora.
It was still summer, and only about 0.5% of the trees even hinted at turning color, but there was a tincture of yellow everywhere.

The park across from Nolen Drive is large enough to have contained a small golf course. The course is closed, and I do not know how long it has been closed, but it the grass did not seem to be cut very frequently.
When we were there, the grass had just been mowed, and there was a residual smell of cut grass in the air. The clippings either were not picked up, or there was so much and it was so long that it defied the pick up system of the lawn mowers: the grass lay in sheaves everywhere, coating the landscape like a old timey German 50 Pfennig note with a woodcut of fräulein gathering sheaves of wheat and barley.

The stems and sheaths of the grass were not so much green as light yellow or beige. The grass was not some golf course fescue that was mothered and tenderly cared for, but had given way to a rougher cord grass variety with a hardy tan/gold/beige and green stems.

The autumnal tints covered half of our perspective, and the eternal Fall of the gold course seemed to mesh with the house of the future that never was to create an enduring symbol of our frustration.

The house on Nolen Drive had a metallic garage door, and it had a few dents in it. Since it was of a kind of appearance I had never seen anywhere before, I thought there was a good chance that it was still original construction.
I had a feeling of the Present battering the Past, trying to break in and tear the place up...

I still have a feeling of Melancholy when I think of it.
There are more tragedies connected to it, that I do not feel I may speak of here, so when I say "melancholy" there is more human pain than merely a kitchen of the future gone awry.

Flint sometimes seems filled with thousands of voices of the past overwhelming hundreds of the present.

The Eternal Autumn of Flint denounces the policies which destroyed our economy !!

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