Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: The Red Mercedes

[Patty (phodg1]

Dane, I do live in cohousing, and I'm still smiling over your message. To quote 
B. Dylan, you can be in my dream if I can be in yours. I too loved Sharon's Red 
Mercedes story and hope to commit it to memory (memory being not altogether 
reliable these days). Before I moved into my community, I imagined that we'd 
all do everything together and that my neighbors would be in and out of my 
house constantly. This fantasy overlooked the fact that it's a pain to get a 
large group pulled together even to go to a movie and that I really don't like 
people coming in and out of my house all the time, if ever. 

So we moved in and soon fell into subgroups and conflicts, and it turned out 
that living in cohousing involved a lot of work in many ways, on many levels. 
Everything was imperfect, and it remains so. Yet whenever I'm talking to anyone 
about cohousing, I always end up telling them that I wouldn't live any other 
way again. Witnessing the trajectories of my neighbors' lives; watching the 
kids be born and grow up; helping and being helped; coming to understand that I 
am every bit as annoying, appreciated, and cared about in my neighbors' eyes as 
they are in mine -- all this adds a richness to my life that is difficult to 
explain and would be hard to find anywhere else.

So, Dane, I hope someday you'll get your red-Mercedes-equivalent. It's 
expensive, but it's worth it.

Patty Hodgins
Hearthstone, Denver
...where in September we had a most fabulous 10th anniversary celebration