Plague Comforts: Planning a Commune

An periodic sequence about nonsense that’s get us through a pandemic. More here.

I have a theory that all female group converses be brought to an end in the same conversation: contriving a commune.

I’ve seen it start a number of ways. A photo of the exuberant banquet one of us cooked should contribute to a mouth desire to host a dinner party with everyone. On a Zoom hangout, someone says a wish to do project activities( tie-dyeing, for example) as working group. The need to share frustration–after putting up a heavy rack or unpacking from a move, or get comfy drive a motorcycle in a city again–becomes a call for help, and one of us wonders if we can just go through it all together.

From there it morphs into plans for vacation, and someone searches for a house to rent. Then we wonder how long we can take off from project( from our partners, our babies ). We wonder if we can diversify our time together by use remotely. It devolves into a realization: We can really wreak our part lives.

By the time you’re on the Instagram account Cheap Old Houses–and tell everyone that buying a place in Dixfield, Maine, and jointly living there for 10 years is very likely be the most logical room to handle taking off work–you know you’re in full-blown commune planning.

This group-living idea appeared to me before the pandemic, but as I’ve talked to far-flung friends in recent months, it’s become an infatuation. It’s rare for our group to go more than a few days without poring over another abandoned beauty, another commune contender. We swoon over the Tudors, the midcenturies, the Victorians, commenting on which have south-facing windows or “good bones.”( We recently expanded to the Nordic version of Cheap Old Houses, and our dreams have gone abroad .)

This wonderful cottage is the perfect 19 th century haven for modern adventurers! This wooden festivity dwelling was built on the shore of the Hitra island not far from wonderful Trondheim. The house sits on a 0.7 acre scheme where you’ll also find an aged barn-turned-guesthouse as well as a boathouse. The range has everything a family could be looking for and then some, from cleansing places to shocking hiking routes and great trawl countries adjacent! #explorehitra

A post shared by Cheap Nordic Houses (@ cheapnordichouses) on Jun 2, 2020 at 9:54 am PDT

We scheme in earnest. We discuss “whos got” which chamber, where to introduce the library, how to earmark cooking responsibilities, what we’d name the chickens, whether to have goats or llamas( or both !). We workshop the best use for the quality. A bed and breakfast? Animal sanctuary? Organic farm? Goat yoga and writer’s retreat ?! We’ve even identified the future utopia: “the cry-mmune.”

For the seven of us–millennials who graduated into a accommodate crisis, recession, and destroying job market–these ramshackle masterpieces often feel like the only homeownership within our reach. If it’s all hopeless, why imagine about a plot in the nation’s most expensive cities( where we live) when you can imagine a whole botanical estate somewhere else?

And more I can’t help but laugh that this deep desire as young adults repetition their own lives I have, in many ways, previously lived. It’s an appeal to my childhood.

The farmhouse as it was purchased, prior to my parent’s restoration.

In his late 30 s my father missed a more pastoral life for us. My mothers traded in our stylish suburban residence for a 150 -year-old farm and moved my siblings, on Christmas eve, to 10 acres in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin. We devoted countless hours and outings to Menards over the next few years fixing up the property. The directory of projects seemed endless. The setbacks–a crumbling foundation, a cellar teeming with liquid shatter, the occasional bat that escaped the attic–were daunt. But when everything was said and done, we had a home. There was a plentiful summer garden, a small apple orchard, and over a dozen llamas. We were #cottagecore before hashtags were a thing.

When I contacted my teenages, I craved nothing more than to escape that life. The mind of moving to a big city is what sustained me through the hard high school years. It took me a long time to realize that my reason was to exit not the lifestyle, but the loneliness. There wasn’t much for parish adjacent, and our closest neighbors lived more than a couple miles out. We had a home, sure, but no one else to share it with.

Taking Kodi( short for Kodacolor) the llama out for a junket.

When a Reddit post became its mode around the Twittersphere recently–wherein a single woman in her 40 s had bought a residence next to her two best single friends–I looked kinship and a brand-new kind of future. The radical thumped down the fencings between their homes and turned it into a shared enclosure with a communal garden. Her married friends rebuked her for putting those rapports above others; the author excused she considered those single friends her family, her life spouses. As a single 30 -something with no end in sight , good-for-nothing in the past few months of lockdown has felt more relatable.

It’s never been more apparent that the person or persons I care most about are the ones I live farthest from. Pandemics have a way of disclosing the need for precisely what we’re missing: competent leadership, reliable healthcare systems, job security, and justice–but likewise community. What I wouldn’t give for a chance to be neighbours, to be in quarantine cod, to be building a community, with our friend right now; to knock down the barricades between our restored cottages and share a meal in our seam garden-variety. My lack of home-repair knowledge, let alone access to power implements, does nothing to dissuade the ever-present yearning to invest my dates steaming off seedy wallpaper or rending up shag carpet to uncover the hardwood underneath. If we ever bought a house for such a project, I know that establishing it a home wouldn’t stop when the restoration was over.

Until then, I’ll make do with imagining our #cottagecore life in every decay, remote residence the algorithms continue to feed me.

Images from left: Birmingham Museums Trust/ Unsplash, Leslie Cross/ Unsplash, Marina Reich/ Unsplash, Dilyar, Garifullina/ Unsplash, Rumman Amin/ Unsplash, Heather Ford/ Unsplash, Dusan Smetana/ Unsplash

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