It takes a village...

Hate to quote Hillary, as I really have no love for the woman, but the saying is not really hers in the first place & it is, after all, quite true.

I have a friend, or rather... had a friend, as he is quite dead to me now due to his inability to respect his fellow humans & their right to life. But that's another story. There was an ongoing conversation between me & this friend, in his saner moments, when we would talk of community & our responsibilities to one another & the communal raising of children, etc. He was much more idealistic in his thoughts on the subject & also a bit more anarchist leaning than I. He would have us all "acquire" some land somewhere, far from the reaches of modern society, & live a communal life much the way many chose to do in the "hippie years" (I use this only for cultural reference, as communal living was certainly not invented by hippies & they were far from doing anything new!). His version of communal living also involved guns & a level of paranoid insanity that tends to naturally come with the territory when discussing moving off to the outskirts of the world & creating one's own society. I've never understood that lifestyle &, frankly, it disturbs me more than a little.

My version of this communal living was a bit more modern &, in fact, something I feel I have naturally cultivated throughout the years in my various locations, especially since having children. And it is something that I am most certainly living today.

I live in central Austin, in an area that some find a bit undesirable, ironically nestled amongst some of the most sought after & desirable homes in town. It's not a bad area, by any means, but our homes are old & not well maintained & lack some of the more desired amenities (central air, heat, proper insulation). Our rent is cheap & our landlords let us slide on months when money is tight & we have to pay late, so in the end we tolerate the downsides. Those of us living in this 'hood tend to all be industrious types who are quite adaptable & have all made our own "improvements" to our homes in order to make them more livable. And we've all, for the most part, naturally fallen into a pattern of communal living with one another in an effort to make life easier for us all.

I am a single mom. Everyone on the block, even the business owners on our strip, know my children & know where they belong. They look out for them. I feel safe letting them walk around or skateboard or ride their bikes. A couple doors down from me lives another single mom, with a a couple of roommates, & recently she started dating another friend of mine, also from the 'hood, who has 2 kids of his own. We all have our own things to bring to the table... she has a car, for instance, & can help us run errands in exchange for gas money or watching her kid. I have a washer & dryer that I gladly share. On weekends we usually have the kids running house to house & eating wherever they end up. Evenings usually see us cooking up large meals at one house or another & sharing with each other. When my plumbing was messed up & being fixed for 2 days, they opened their restroom to us (thank god!) & when they had money issues & had to go without gas for a little while, I gladly let them come over to shower.

I live in the kind of neighbourhood where people are always around - walking, sitting on their porch, etc. I know that I am safe here because I know that they all have my back. We have each others' backs. We live as a community & take a degree of responsibility for one another &, especially, for the children, yet we also live as individuals & respect one another's need for privacy & individualism.

At times I think of leaving, moving to a house with central air & heat, one where landlords respond to maintenance requests & I don't have to worry about covering my windows with plastic tarping every winter to keep out the draft or make sure to turn off the oil heaters in the living room before running the microwave or drying my hair, so as not to trip the breaker. I think about how nice it would be to have my own bedroom & enough closet space... & then I think of all the things I would be giving up. Of how secluded I would feel & how I am unlikely to find a similar community in another area because this community was, in essence, born of necessity & would likely cease to exist in an area where all needs were met within the 4 confining walls of a well heated home.

This is my village. My modern-day commune. And I think I kinda like it here.