This stamp is on the south side of East Michigan Avenue between Regent and Clemens. Isabella Corporation is based in Mount Pleasant, which is in Isabella County. Their business address is on Commerce Street. Despite the fact that I have worked in Mount Pleasant for fifteen years, I don’t know where that is without looking it up. As a commuter, I really only know the area around my workplace and a couple of places that co-workers like to gather. I think this might be the furthest out of town any of the contractors have been from, among those I could identify. Mount Pleasant, as I very well know, is around an hour’s drive away.

The stamp is in front of the building with the front ramp pictured below. It’s a big old (1916) American Foursquare house that has been converted to an office at some point. Such houses are common on this stretch of Michigan.

I’m not sure what, if anything, is in the house right now. I still think of it as “where the anarchist bookstore used to be” even though that is very long gone and was there only briefly. I have memories of walking home from the Michigan and Clemens bus stop after work, passing the Brighter Days Infoshop. I never went in there, but I remember people often seemed to be hanging around on the porch, which was open at the time. (I think it looked a lot better that way.) In my memory, this spans a greater time than in reality. In fact, I was very surprised when I discovered that Brighter Days opened in August 2003 and was closed by early July 2004. The building spent much longer as a chiropractor’s office and yet for some reason that’s not what’s lodged in my memory.