Fostering Community: A Progressive Dinner

For a couple of years now, we've been celebrating the Solstice (both summer and winter) by having a progressive dinner with several families from our neighborhood. If you've never done one, a progressive dinner is so much fun! You start at one house for appetizers, proceed to the next house for salad, the next house for soup, and so on. This year we ended up at our house for desserts. Each family hosts everyone for about 45 minutes to an hour, and the walk between the houses is just as much fun as the dinner part.

This year, at about the salad course, we also started singing. We started out with rounds and went to carols and solstice songs (with several glasses of wine by that time, it took all of our collective brains to remember the right order for everything in the 12 Days of Christmas), and ended up at our house with me accompanying on the piano and singing more carols. This is a great way to reconnect with neighbors that you may not see as often as you'd like throughout the daily busyness of our lives. We stop and chat while walking the dogs, or our kids are running in and out of each others' houses, but we don't always get the time to really catch up. This gives us a chance to really talk and listen to what's going on in each others' lives.

Keeping Our Local Businesses Around

I've been meaning to pass on this link to the 3/50 Project for awhile. It's a very simple concept - just remembering to patronize our local businesses, keep them around, and keep our money helping out our local economies. What businesses in your area could you not live without?

For me, it's our little corner grocery store/cafe, our great local bike stores, and the local bookstore down the road that stocks stuff you don't see on the endcaps in Borders. A couple of years ago we lost our awesome local video store. We could walk down there in the evening and the folks that worked there knew every movie ever made. You could ask them "Hey, you remember that movie, the one that had Edward Norton and that other guy ...you know, the one who played Capote...and Norton talks to himself in a mirror?" and they'd pull out 25th Hour and that would be the movie you were thinking of. Well, it's gone because I guess too many folks went to Hollywood video so now that's all we've got left around here.

So if you don't want your favorite coffee shop or bookstore or whatever going the way of my video store, make sure you go there, even to buy a bagel or a paperback every now and then.

Reducing Garbage, Part 1

A while back, someone on a list I'm on asked for tips on reducing garbage. I've been meaning to write about it for awhile, and every now and then a new idea pops into my head and I jot it down somewhere. It's amazing how little garbage you can produce, once you really become aware of what you throw away and start working on reducing it. We get the smallest can that our garbage company gives out, and we've shared it with our renter and the family across the street and had room left over. One thing you can start doing is becoming aware of what you're throwing away. You don't have to dig through the trash, but just look at it when you toss something else in and think about whether that thing could be eliminated, substituted, recycled, or composted. I'm sure this is far from a comprehensive list, but here's a few ideas at least...

1) Compost: One of the first steps you can take is to stop throwing away food scraps. Compost piles can range from big wire-enclosed areas, to small portable worm bins. Turning your food scraps into gardening soil is a great first step at garbage reduction. Resources for Composting and Worm Bins abound on the internet, and in many cases in your local community. There's even a worm bin specifically designed to turn your pet waste into usable compost, thus keeping it out of the landfill as well.

2) Return to Cloth: Perhaps the easiest thing to remove from your garbage is anything disposable - napkins, paper towels, baby wipes, kleenex, diapers, etc. These used to be the main culprits, but the past few years have seen a veritable explosion in the disposable market, with everything from bibs to facial washcloths, to Swiffer mops being produced just to be used once and thrown away. One of the easiest ways to stop throwing this kind of stuff in the trash is simply to stop buying it. Once I stopped buying paper napkins, I had to have something else in place to use. I started adding to my small supply of cloth napkins (and actually I used washcloths for awhile until I had a big enough stash). I found that if I had a roll of paper towels or a paper napkin handy, it was easy to reach for them. Without them around, you simply don't use them. I do keep a roll of paper towels in the garage for use in times of desperate measures (the cat just barfed on the carpet, that kind of thing), but I haven't bought a new roll since we moved into this house 8 years ago, so they last a long time that way. Cloth diapers, handkerchiefs, washcloths, mop covers, napkins, and bibs are long-lasting and relatively easy to toss in the washing machine (even the diapers weren't as icky and intimidating as I thought they'd be before having babies).

3) Look For Less Packaging: Often we don't have the option of buying something with less packaging - it seems like you need a pair of gardening shears and an expert safe-cracker just to get into the packaging for your basic CD these days. But often we have an option to buy something with less packaging or substitute something reusable. Rechargeable batteries for instance, not only save you from having to dispose of toxic batteries, but also all the packaging that they come in. Buying meat locally means that it comes straight from the butcher wrapped in white paper, instead of resting on styrofoam trays. Buying produce locally avoids those nasty plastic clamshells that are becoming popular in places like Trader Joe's, and if you can swing it to get stuff like milk and eggs from a local source, you can also eliminate egg and milk cartons from your garbage stream and re-use glass bottles instead. Even if you don't have a direct source, there are still local dairies that use and re-use glass bottles (usually with a deposit).

4) Borrow, Barter, Buy Used: If you need to buy something, you can think about whether or not it's something you can borrow, or barter for, or buy used first. Not buying stuff new eliminates packaging, transportation, and possibly having to deal with the remains of whatever you've bought. If you think about it, there's usually no reason for every person on the block to have a hedge trimmer, or a particular best-selling book, or even a pickup truck. Sharing with neighbors or friends is a bonus to all (including the environment). Our chicken tractor is on its way to the 3rd family we've lent it to. Our power-washer has made the rounds of every deck and fence in the neighborhood, and we've borrowed our neighbor's truck or trailer when we needed to haul something. Our daughter is clothed entirely in wonderful hand-me-downs from the neighbor girl down the street, and the clothes keep right on flowing from her to a smaller friend a few blocks away. Thinking outside the box when it comes to consumer goods is also a great way to boost your budget, while reducing your impact on your garbage can and the earth.

The Neighborhood Ambassador

So we planted too much lettuce. Way too much lettuce. My hubby ended up taking out about half of it, and then what do you do with a sink full of lettuce (and a few earwigs)? Have a Great Lettuce Giveaway, of course! Miss A. volunteered to take lettuce to everyone in the neighborhood, so I washed and bagged and she headed out on runs to the various neighbors' houses. All in all, she delivered about six or seven lettuce bundles (hey, at least it wasn't zucchini, all right?).

That's one thing I really value about her, she knows how to reach out to other people. In that way, she's a lot like her dad. I've noticed that he always remembers people's names, and makes a habit of using their name in conversation, even if it is just the person at the hotel reservations desk in Dallas, Texas, I'll hear him say "Okay, thanks for helping me David". It's one of the things I really like about him and wish I could do better (well, I wish peoples' names would just stick in my head for starters. I once, famously, forgot my own manager's name at work and we had worked together for over six years at that point). But when it comes to maintaining neighborhood relationships, no one tops Miss A. We had a Solstice campfire (not big enough to really call it a bonfire), and she walked around inviting the neighbors. And I'm not just talking about kids, she'll walk over to houses with only adults and invite them over. She knows all the adults by name, and is more than happy to talk with them. As a result, we had neighbors come to our Solstice gathering that I hadn't seen in awhile and had the opportunity to catch up with what they're doing now.

I think when discussions turn to sustainability that building and maintaining community is often not given the attention that it deserves. Sure, it's all the rage to think about forming an intentional community. And some of them do get formed and some of them are succesful in the long-term, which is terrific. But beyond that, for those of us who are not going to uproot and move to a created community, nurturing the relationships with the people who live close to us is important, and something we don't often take the time for. Sometimes it takes a kid to remind us of the importance of reaching out to others. Of not being embarassed to go knocking on doors. Even to hand out bunches of lettuce.

The Path to Friendship

Just outside my back gate is a rough path. It leads across a straw-strewn (covering newly planted clover) former empty lot that is becoming the house and yard of our good friends. Eventually, that path will lead to their back deck. Our children and theirs will run back and forth along it to each others' houses. I can see myself walking along it, trailing steam from an oversized mug of tea, to share a morning moment with my friends, can hear shouted messages at twlight for the kids to come on back from mucking around the creek or throwing a frisbee.

Their house is aiming for to be a "Net Zero" or near Zero energy use house. They're incorporating all kinds of wonderful design aspects, from a huge rainwater catchment basin under the deck to innovative drainfields and solar power. I am really excited to see their design taking shape, and to get to learn from the processes that they are using. We aren't building a new house any time soon, but hope to gradually implement some of these ideas as we add to our existing structure and lot (for instance, a greenhouse addition that we are contemplating might have built-in rainwater catchment underneath its foundation.)

More than anything, I'm grateful that the view from my windows is friendship, community, good neighbors.

Imagine, a Connected Life

One of the things I love about where we live is that I feel a part of an interconnected web. Part of it is the town, which is small enough to know many people. If we go to the library, the farmer's market, the pool, or the neighborhood store, we're very likely to run into someone we know. Part of it is the neighborhood we chose, one in which community is highly valued. We have an "intentional neighborhood" a block or so down the street, but almost everyone in the blocks around us is very community-oriented. Part of it is the circles we run in, which tend to overlap and intersect so we are always meeting people who know people who we know. Unschooling, sustainability, community, music, gardening, these themes that run through our lives bring us in contact with the most wonderful people.

This week, we took a toy bouncy horse that my kids had outgrown to a homeschooling family down the street that we met at the gym last year. They're now taking violin lessons from my daughter's old teacher. The violin teacher emailed me last week about whether or not a "chicken tractor" that she borrowed from us could be loaned to someone else. In turn, I need to call her to ask if we might be able to use her partner's saws to cut some wood for a bookcase. The circles go on and on with people helping, communicating, introducing people to other people until it feels like there is a giant lovely web that we have all somehow built.

I have lived places without this web, and it can feel lonely, isolated, disconnected. I think we are meant to feel this web connecting us - a feeling that if we somehow were to stumble or fall, that other people would hold their threads strong and we would be okay. Without that, it sometimes feels as if there is an abyss below our feet and that if somehow lose our tenuous grasp of things, we will disappear into its maw. I think about the stress that people feel in "modern life" and believe it is largely the stress of complete self-reliance, something we are probably not meant to ever be.