October 2007 | From the Editor
We Get By With a Little Help From Our Friends
The other night, I had another dream about the Grove Street House. During my years as an undergrad in Boulder, Colorado, six of us shared the saggy-porched, paint-peeling, “three bedroom” on the corner of 21st and Grove. Sure, the place was pretty much a dump, over-stuffed with hippie coeds and derelict from decades of college-renter neglect. Sure we lived with constant low-grade anxiety — that our landlord would discover our over-occupancy and evict us, that the peeping toms we occasionally encountered lurking in our backyard would take advantage of our lax door and window locking policy.
But despite the constant roommate squabbles and dirty dishes, Grove Street is still a sweet spot in my memory, an indelible mark on my formative years. It’s where I developed many of my defining tastes and proclivities — my fondness for salvage-chic, my spicy curries and my tendency to overdo it on the houseplants. It’s where I built friendships that sustain me to this day. It’s where I grew up.
Now, living in clean, quiet couplehood, in a tony neighborhood, in an apartment where I can identify the origins of every dirty dish, I sometimes miss the communal chaos. I bump into my building neighbors so rarely, if it weren’t for their cars in the garage and the sporadic television through the walls, I’d doubt their existence.
While I don’t know if I’ll ever live with roommates again, I’m pretty sure heaven is a late night kitchen table conversation with a cup of tea or glass of wine in a house full of dear friends. If you agree, you’ll love our story on Intentional Communities in this month’s issue. Instead of subscribing to the picket fence/two-car garage/nuclear family American Dream, denizens of the new communal living movement choose old fashioned, neighborly village life.
Their interpretations of cooperative living vary. Sometimes it’s sharing everything — from homes to grocery budgets to domestic duties to radical politics. Sometimes it’s simply a more socially-oriented spin on your average suburban development — with residents owning their own single-family properties, but sharing back yards, gardens, community buildings and the ethic that life’s better when you know your neighbors.
In a world where technology, the culture wars, the poverty gap and the McMansionization of America seem to be conspiring to keep us ever more isolated from each other, it’s encouraging to discover people bucking the trend and coming together. Because, as I learned long ago in a little falling-down house by the mountains, everything’s more fun when you do it with friends. Even the dishes.
—Eliza Thomas, Editor in Chief
![[Send]](http://wholelifetimes.com/sendlink/send.gif){kind=small}
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
