Murals and Gardens in Alamo Township

Southwest Michigan, staying out in Alamo Township — 36 square miles of fields and woods with fewer than four thousand people in it, just northwest of Kalamazoo. The morning went to Kalamazoo itself, walking the murals Bell's painted on the long wall along the railroad tracks: a sunburst of rays fanning up behind a scatter of dark hop cones under the Bell's sign, then a whole run of brew tanks and piping done in flat gray silhouette on green and yellow block, and around toward the chimney a sun with a face and OPEN TO ALL lettered beside it. You have to stand in the gravel by the rails to take the tank wall in.

Back at the house in the township — a white hanging sign off the porch post names it Sunny Valley — the rest of the day stayed in the yard. A kinetic sculpture spins colored paddles on a bent steel stalk over the milkweed bed, and the lawn runs past a patio of wicker chairs into an unmowed meadow, brush and then trees on the far rise. Inside, an upright piano with a metronome on top. The sedum around the sculpture is just starting to bud.