Another Day in the Country
A communing community
© Another Day in the Country
My friend Doc gave me his well-used, trustworthy Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary when he died. I use it quite a bit and opened it up today to remind me about what it means to live in a community.
Community: A society of people who have common rights. In simple terms, it’s the group of people who live near you.
In Ramona, I rarely see my community.
If they’ve moved into town recently, I have trouble remembering some of their names.
They end up being those folks who own those sheep across the street, or maybe whose kids I might know from school. Or they’re the people whose dogs bark and whose cats make themselves at home on the padded rocking chairs on my front porch.
Your community ends up being the cars that go by your house, hopefully with mufflers, obeying the speed limit.
They are the people who burn trash in their backyard and hopefully tell you ahead of time to close your doors and windows so your house doesn’t smell like garbage burning.
They are the folks, if you’re lucky, that you can call on for help in a crisis or to bail you out of emergencies, like when you’ve just had your car fixed with a brand-new fuel pump and it stops working 10 miles out of Abilene.
Community are the folks who live around you, and it’s good for us to get together every once in a while. It’s amazing to me how long you can reside within a five-block area and not see a soul except the UPS guy.
Being a good community member means we don’t get to act as if no one else is around, even if we don’t see them every day.
It means we monitor ourselves and our actions so that we don’t unduly trouble our next-door neighbor.
We think about our impact on our neighborhood. We may not mind all the dead cars in our yard, but what about the folks next door or down the street?
I think community living is fairly agreed upon. If you want to have a dog or collect junk in your yard, build a tall fence around your property so the rest of the world doesn’t have to look at it.
On the other hand, if you want to be a good neighbor, plant flowers, mow your lawn, keep your pets contained, train your kids to be polite, turn down your music. Those are pretty simple rules.
I used to think that the Golden Rule was universally well known, but I learned that it doesn’t always translate.
Some folks don’t mind broken throwaways all over the yard, and they don’t even notice that their world is in disarray.
So, in a community we try to make a few rules we can agree upon and find some middle ground for minimum requirements because we live together.
Come to think of it, if you live on planet Earth, you are always and forever in a community because you aren’t the only person on the planet — at least not yet!
We all spin through the universe on the same ball, breathing the same air, facing the same environmental consequences that we create for each other with our ignorance and neglect, and there’s nothing we can do about it except get smarter, more aware, more willing to care about our community and our impact on everyone.
As my mother aged, she sometimes got so bewildered about what she considered “how things have always been.”
She’d get perplexed about a wide variety of changes from unfamiliar appliances and taxation rules to what people fought over, and she’d say, “I don’t know. I just need to get off the planet.”
She didn’t understand how society functioned any longer, Sometimes it was over big issues like atomic bombs that could obliterate a whole city in one blow. Sometimes it was over little things like women not wearing nylon stockings when they went to church.
“What’s the world coming to?” she’d say and shake her head.
In my little community of Ramona, I think I’m now the oldest person in town. A block or so away, the youngest member of our town resides.
There are well more than 80 years between us, and I was well aware of that as I bent down the other evening and played with her in my front yard on Halloween.
I had little kid scarecrows in my front yard, and she plunked herself down among them, chortling to herself.
Of course, I took pictures.
It was just a simple community thing, Halloween night with kids going trick or treating, but it was a lovely chance to “commune.”
By laughing and chatting with this tiny tot and her parents, we acknowledged our presence in the same neighborhood. We got to know each other a little better.
I’m so glad that my community is a safe place for little kids like her to grow up as well as a caring place for those of us growing older. That should always be our goal in a community.
To do that, we need to keep in touch, pledge to support each other, find occasions to work together and sometimes play together — even if it’s something so silly and simple as Halloween.
That’s such a small thing, but the healthiest communities just keep on doing those small things that make spending another day in the country so much fun!