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Meet Chris Touhey and his wife Laura, both 34 and exceptions to Michigan’s “brain drain”. Chris grew up near Glen Arbor (his family lived for a time in a farmhouse near Port Oneida that’s now in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore), left for school in Ann Arbor then spent a decade in sunny southern California. He and Laura moved this past January into a one-bedroom home that he built near the old Dickinson Gallery on south shore of Little Glen Lake. Their daughter Finley was born in February. Touhey, an architect by trade, works for a construction firm that, as luck would have it, is doing a project for the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in nearby Peshawbestown.

Benzie County natives Ethan Przekaza and Meg Doby — the latest in our occasional series on northern Michigan boomerangs — are exceptions to Michigan’s brain drain. Earlier this year they moved back from Colorado, bought a house in nearby Beulah and landed work in March at Matt and Katy Wiesen’s Crystal River Outfitters in Glen Arbor.

Peter and Cassidy (Edwards) Fisher are exceptions to the Michigan brain drain. Natives of Glen Arbor and bearing last names that are part of the town’s fabric, they forsook the East Coast and returned five years ago to make Leelanau their home.