Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: CoHousing Stories

[Joani Blank (jeblank]

Thanks Brian for your suggestion that we post feel-good stories here
regularly, and for kicking it off with such a heartwarming tale. 

Here's a little snippet of an anecdote: During the first few weeks of our
living at Doyle St. together, One of my neighbors came through the common
house dining room door, directly from work, with a cheery, "Hi honeys, I'm
home!" It gave me happy goosebumps. Two years later his baby daughter took
her first steps just before common dinner for all of us to observe and
celebrate. 

Another little one: Thanks to the technology of baby monitors, we can now
babysit for one another without either the baby or the sitter having to
leave home. It's cool!

And finally for this round: I love the way we adapt to special food needs
for common meals without fuss here. It seems this is a very charged and
contentious issue in some coho groups, and maybe this could happen only in a
community as small as ours (12 units), but here everyone knows that K hates
mushrooms, the other K is deathly allergic to peanuts, B can't have any
dairy products, M can't eat spicy stuff, L can't have sugar or honey, and we
have one strict and several wannabe vegitarians.  It's just not a big deal.
There's almost always enough to eat around what you can't have or don't like
Or you can ask that a place be set for you and bring your own dinner once in
a while. Or depending on who is signed up, the cook will use margarine
instead of butter, sweeten deserts with fruit juice,  leave the meat out of
some of the spaghetti sauce, or leave the musrooms whole so they are easy to
pick out. You get the idea. So see, you can please all of the people most of
the time. And here we get to save our contentiousness for more important things!

Joani