Cohousing-L Mailing List: Why do you need Archives?

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

I love doing research and reading history so just the entertainment value of 
being able to read newspapers and letters that have been saved from other lives 
is reason enough to “keep everything”. 

A practical reason is to "prove what happened” or didn’t happen. What was 
really decided and why? What was the order of events? Yes, we agreed that all 
plantings along the green would be flowering plants but what did “all” and 
“flowering” mean in 1989? (Anyone who has been following the conservative 
interpretations of the US Constitution will recognize this argument.)

But there is a much more important reason — to remember and understand where 
you have come from and to include new members in the fullest experience of the 
community. 

My image of cohousing is of family compounds. Places where generations of 
families have built camps or summer homes and everyone gathers not just summers 
but on holidays as well. And some people may stay year around. Or a farming 
family that builds additional houses on the land as the generations grow. The 
households are together but peacefully private as well. 

So when we had a rash of new members, in one two year period about 7 households 
turned over, I started thinking about how families integrate new members. Our 
members had left for all the normal reasons family members change but the 
changes had clustered which increased the force. How had families traditionally 
integrated new members and remained one family?  For generations. (Obviously, 
not all do but we are talking utopian dreams here.)

As we tried to include new members, I was struck by how often new members would 
close off discussions by saying “That’s history. This is now.” Or “we aren’t 
talking about history, we are starting fresh from today.” “There is no history; 
it’s just us.” “We do things differently."

When I offered to show a new resident who had just had a baby, pictures of 
other babies born in the community, she wasn’t interested unless they weren’t 
still in the community — people who were here right now. That others of us had 
loved these babies, babies that had played with the same toys her baby was 
playing with, had no meaning for her.

While there are good times to try to start fresh and put the past behind us, 
ignoring the past will pretty much leave you with a very thin present. New 
friends can be like fresh air, but even an old enemy can be more comfortable. I 
once lamented to a colleague that there were so many new faculty members and 
that meetings were unpredictable and even unproductive. I just wanted some old 
friends in the room. He said, “Even old enemies would a good thing.”

The ways I know that families integrate new members is in the preparation of 
meals, the sharing of stories “about when”, and dragging out photograph albums. 
Meals require interaction in tasks we are all familiar with (for the most part) 
so there is a task for everyone. If we are going to continue to be a family, we 
need to learn everything related to food and meals. Sharing ourselves is 
sharing our stories. That is who we are. How we got to be who we are. And 
photographs provide more opportunities to share stories and deepen the 
experience of those no longer present but still very much alive in everyone’s 
lives. If “Aunt Mabel” was the defining force in most of the family member’s 
lives and they have no interest in forgetting her. And couldn’t if they wanted 
to. 

New people often felt excluded when we talked about “the past” or mentioned by 
name people who were no longer there. “See, we don’t know who that is so that 
story just excludes us.” As if we were telling those stories just to show new 
members that they weren’t really members.

Understanding the present means understanding the past. The reason we have no 
hot water in the guest rooms or that it takes 15 minutes to get there is not 
because we are dumb or don’t know how to run a pipe, it’s because the people 
who originally chose the hot water heater were trying to save money by 
installing a high-efficiency gas water heater instead of a much less efficient 
electric water heater. The fact that the gas water heater had to go on the 
other side of the building, 100 ft away because it needed an exhaust vent, 
instead of in the basement right under the guestrooms (and the laundry room) 
didn’t occur to them. They had new graduate degrees in energy efficiency.

Those are the stories that are still alive and well in the community, that make 
it a community. They need to be shared if everyone is going to feel included. I 
still haven’t figured out — other than meals — how to share these stories, 
because it takes time. Not as much time as it took to create the stories but a 
lot of time. One of the things we used to do on the anniversary of move-in was 
to tell stories about what it was like (chaos) but after a few years, only the 
founding members attend.

One of the nice things about old members coming back to visit is that it puts a 
face on those old memories.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org