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city girl
MARY LOU SANELLI looks for community Where's My Tribe? 
Are we all loners? (Like our editor Clark, I recently visited Port Townsend. Here is the piece I wrote, of interest, I think to many of us here in Belltown, where apartment buildings and condos form sort of a co-housing atmosphere, especially when we make a point to know our neighbors.) --- Wow, such a beautiful place. My first thought as I entered the grounds of Port Townsend's RoseWind Co-housing Community, a nine-acre stretch of land within the city limits. I was invited to give a reading in its common room, and so, books in my trunk, I drove out to the City of Dreams, a city I lived in once, and now, like other Seattleites, only get to visit now and again. RoseWind is not a new development. I first heard of it in the early '90s but I paid it no mind. I like to think I'm the kind of woman who could live in a co-housing community, but I don't fool myself. All I have to do is say the word "co-housing" and I think lack of privacy, internal politics, and who are those people traipsing through my yard? Now, I'm intrigued. Both my parents recently moved into "co-housing" situations of another kind: retirement communities. Still, other than the age requirements of their new "communities," the idea is much the same. Right? Both living situations set up a common room where residents meet for activities, meals, socializing, gossip fests. So what's the real difference between co-housing and a retirement community, a condo, or any development that thinks of itself as unique? Especially in a town like Port Townsend, isolated geographically so that its real community is still intact. Naturally, I'm not talking about legal differences. I'm more interested in the expectation of the word "community" from its residents. The idea of co-housing may be firm in the minds of RoseWind's occupants, but for me the interpretation of the word is just beginning. So I called Doug Millholland, one of the original RoseWind advocates. "We're a tribe," he said. "Really?" Usually it takes more time to extract such honesty. But Doug dove right in, gave me what I wanted. The word "tribe" more than "co-housing" explains to me what people are really looking for when they set out to form a community: an extended family, especially when true family isn't in the picture. People are tribal by nature, I've always thought so. We look to find our own in the world. Still, the abundance of choice in our country can make decisions difficult, but it also makes them possible. And the possibility of working out everything from "what to raise in our community garden" to "how to share a lawn mower" is Doug's life goal and why, he says, he wants to live in co-housing. Which made me think that sharing hardly feels like too high a price to pay for kinship. My conversation with Doug struck another chord, too: Where's my tribe? I thrive here in the Northwest, sure, but my roots don't go all that deep, either. A week after my reading, I talked to a woman, not a member of RoseWind, who moved to Port Townsend twenty years ago. I repeated part of my conversation with Doug. "I hate the word tribe," she admitted. Then, later in our conversation, she said something that startled me: that she rarely shops at Port Townsend's small, local Aldrich's Grocery anymore since "out-of-towners" bought it and "changed its feel." What? As if she and I aren't outsiders to those born in the Northwest. But what she was really saying is the new owners aren't part of her "tribe" though she'd never say so. And disliked that I did. "You wrote a story," Doug said, "about one of your elderly neighbors, how you watched her tend her garden year after year. Think how well you could have known her if you'd sat down to dinner several nights a week together in a co-housing experience." I didn't say, "but I didn't want to know her better, sometimes from afar is enough." Still, I was challenged by his directness. I liked it. And no matter where I live, honesty is what I like to share. For me, that's the definition of community. Sanelli's newest book is Falling Awake. |
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