Cohousing-L Mailing List: Stories about life in cohousing -- Braford

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

Carol Braford  Culver Way Cohousing  St Louis, MO  Braford [at] aol.com 
is the author of the message below. 
It was posted by Fred the Cohousing-L list manager <fholson [at] cohousing.org> 
because the message included HTML ;      PLEASE do not post HTML, see
   http://csf.colorado.edu/cohousing/2001/msg01672.html

Note: actually this message also included the story as a MS Word .doc file
also which is also problematic on the list.  I converted the .doc file to 
text and included it below.   Fred 
--------------------  FORWARDED MESSAGE FOLLOWS --------------------


[ On a Jan 30, 2002 Joani Blank  wrote a message "[C-L]_Remembering Why ]
[ we Thought Cohousing Was a Good Idea Redux" , to which this is a reply.]

Joani,

Here is an article Tom wrote about living in community.  I love the idea
of putting people's stories together in a book.

Carol


A Community Already    by Tom Braford

When I was growing up on a farm in Michigan, I often heard people say "you
can take a boy out of the farm, but you can never take the farm out of the
boy".  I guess that explains why as an adult, city slicker I still can't
resist rolling down the window and mooing at the cows when driving in the
country, or why I have to get dirt under my fingernails come planting time.

The cohousing experience is like farming in that regard.  Once you've been
there, you can never really leave.  I believe that goes for the community
building that happens before move-in as much as in the actual living in
cohousing.  With farming, there comes a point at which enough cool mud in
the spring has oozed up between your toes or enough alfalfa hay or wheat
chaff has stuck to your sweaty brow in August that you are forever
transmuted.

Cohousing is like that.  Zev Paiss' Group Building Workshop was like cool
spring mud between our toes.  Making our first consensus decision, which in
our case was to use consensus decision making for all our future decisions,
was such a delight.  The Common House Design Workshop with Chuck Durrett
and the Unit Design Workshop with Chuck Durrett and Greg Ramsey were like
alfalfa hay and wheat chaff sticking to our brow.  It was the kind of hard
work that gives you a sense of accomplishment that you can feel in your
bones.

And then there are the little things, the 'caw, caw' of crows in winter and
the melody of meadowlarks in spring.  The spontaneous jam sessions around
the piano after common meals and potlucks are like that.  But nothing
infuses farming like adversity, and the same can be said for the community
that emerges when something goes awry in cohousing.  On the farm it was the
night my father rousted my brothers and me out of a dead sleep to help him
rescue a newborn calf that was in the path of a rapidly rising creek.

At Culver Way Cohousing, it was the first time we initiated the emergency
phone tree.  Our dear friend and founding member, Gail Borden, had
suggested that we establish the phone tree and ironically we were using it
for the first time to let everyone know that he had been killed in a
massive car accident on his way to Florida.  We gathered at the temporary
common house that night to share our grief and comfort each other.  Then,
like farm boys rousted by their father in the middle of the night, we
sprang into action to support Gail's family and other friends, helping to
plan and organize the memorial service and hosting a reception at the
common house afterwards.

The design team that Gail had been such an active part of met in emergency
session to plan a memorial garden and other tributes.  Since then, any
pettiness that existed in our group has all but disappeared.  A new sense
of urgency has come over us.   We are laughing harder, crying harder and
working harder to hasten the day when we will live together in cohousing
driven by the knowledge that we are a community already.




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