About Community Building, Selfishness, and My New Summer Kitchen

Community has never lost its importance within my life.  I started off in a money poor farm family who simply would not have survived intact without the help of friends and neighbors.  The same was said about our friends and neighbors...they would not have survived intact without us.  I said this to a young woman who had been raised outside the protective arms of community and she said my childhood must have been a rough one, being raised so poor.   Nothing could have been further from the truth.  We children were raised by parents who had the ability to be with us, by grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles who slowed down their jobs to show us all how things are done.  It is often easier to just do a job than it is to slow down and teach how a job is done.  I was raised with people who saw the elderly as people with knowledge, who saw their children as the future, who felt like they belonged with others.  Men and women worked side by side and each of their jobs shared in importance. Community isn't some vague concept, it is the way we live.

Now being a member of community does not mean we desperately need to be in contact with each other every second of every day.  In fact, this seems to be a need of those who do not belong to a community.  I can not see a friend for months and when we meet,  we just jump in where we left off.  We don't crowd each other or need to know what each is doing all the time.   Sometimes we are with each other for 24 hours a day when we come together, other times we may not see each other until the season's change.  Being part of a community does not mean we lose our individuality.  It simply means that we have come together as individuals to work, play, eat, talk, sing, laugh and cry together.  Then we may go our separate ways until the next time. 

Building a community of individuals instead of a community of zombies following a central leader or idea seems to be the hard thing for many people.  Too many people live on the idea of absolutes.  If you and I disagree, You are WRONG and I am RIGHT.  There is no middle ground, no seeing that we both have blessed moments of stupidity and strong moments of gifted inspiration.  Basically many have forgotten how to respect each other, which is the mirror image of how we have forgotten how to respect ourselves.   Often the more powerless a person feels about themselves, the more they try to strip others of their power.

I have always felt that this is the key to rebuilding sagging communities.  Give the power, the knowledge, the ability to care for themselves, BACK to the people.  This statement is misleading though because the people have never really truly lost this power so they don't need to have it given back, they have just forgot it for awhile.  They have been taught that they really don't have the ability to care for themselves and therefor they should give that power over to the people who can take care of them.   We do NOT need saving, we do NOT need to save each other.  We need to work with each other, play with each other, teach each other and learn from each other.  From there respect for ourselves and each other will grow.

This is what I was attempting to do last winter when I invited people to learn how to cook on a wood fire kitchen stove by opening up my summer kitchen to anyone who wanted to learn to cook on a wood fire kitchen range.  Okay, I admit that I had no idea how many people were going to line up to do this.  I hadn't even put a limit on how many people could come at once because I didn't think there would be more than a small handful of people who cared to learn this skill.  The first day we had 26 people crammed into my summer kitchen, standing on their tip toes to watch me bake bread in a wood fire oven.  What a fiasco.  lol

So, live and learn and don't be afraid to make mistakes--has always been my motto.  It's a good one for me because I make a lotta mistakes. :-)  The next weekend we limited to ten people with a sign up sheet at our local farmer's market.  The ten spots were filled before the market was even open for business.  Dang, I thought this would be a small group of people and here it was turning out to be much more than I had bargained for.  Luckily I am co-owner of a folk school and we have apprentices.  I had a class just for the apprentices and then they began teaching others how to cook on a wood fire kitchen stove.  Now people could learn a skill that many seemed to want to learn, I didn't have to give up all my weekends teaching, and the apprentices got hand on training on how to teach.  Everything came out fine...right?

Well, here's where human emotions can jump into the mix and just screw up a good thing.  I'm talking about MY emotions.  I had a summer kitchen because I USED a summer kitchen.  If I hadn't needed a summer kitchen that building would have been used for a chicken coop or a wood shed or something that I did need.  Suddenly MY summer kitchen wasn't MINE anymore.  Even when others weren't using it, I had a hard time finding what I was looking for, I needed to clean up and put things in the right place before I could start using it.  I began to get a little upset that I was losing control of an important piece of my farm.  Then I would get upset with myself because I was upset because I had always been really big on building community by sharing knowledge.  Slowly I was becoming one of the people who wanted to hoard her STUFF.  The words "my" and "mine" became more and more a part of my thinking.  Yet I knew that I had been blessed with teachers of all sorts who had passed this knowledge to me, so how can I turn my back on others who just wanted to learn? 

One day I told my friend Linda what I was feeling.  I said I had almost stopped using my own summer kitchen because it was bugging me so much.  She laugh...and it was at me, not with me.  Hey, I was being silly.  It's part of the whole human experience to make mistakes and then take them seriously. 

"You live in your summer kitchen in the summer," she said.  "And now you're just going to martyr yourself out for others."

Dang, that stung.  I've never been a big fans of martyrs.  They tend to be annoying.  Don't sacrifice yourself for me and then remind me of it forever.  I can screw up just fine on my own, thank you very much!  Yet, here I was, feeling all sorry for myself because I needed to help others, save them.  Oh no, I was becoming the very people I have fought against.  The people who are saving us from ourselves.

There's no need to wring my hands or bang my head against the wall.  Choices need to be made and then we move on.  The choices were; 1) stop or at least cut down the number of classes and people in my summer kitchen.  2) build a summer kitchen at the school and let people work out of that.  3) build myself another summer kitchen and call it MINE, MINE, MINE!

Well, selfishness won and I don't feel bad about that.  None of us should give up our individual-ness to be part of a community.  We are who we are for a reason, because each of us has an important part to play here on earth.  We should grow and learn but NEVER give up who we are.  That person is important, warts and all.  We all need each and every one of those people and we are all those people.  The only community that would ask us to give up who we are to belong is one that cannot last.  No one can bury who they are forever.  Eventually the little imp of yourself will sneak out of the back of your brain and take over...usually with an annoying flare for the dramatic.  By being yourself to begin with, again warts and all, means that little imp is you and you're in control of you.

So, after this long and boring post I finally get to the point of my summer kitchen.  I had a summer kitchen raising party this weekend.   I live in the middle of Amish country and barn raising happen out here every couple of years.  Fourteen people came out to help with everything from making food to feed the workers, to watching the kids, to actually building on the summer kitchen.  In three and a half days I now have my new summer kitchen.  It's not quite finished, I still have to put up the chimney and I found out I bought the wrong size stove pipe but that will be finished tomorrow.  I have already started moving some stuff in, but can't move everything in until the chimney is up.

So here are a few pictures.  I didn't take as many as I planned because...well...I was working.  This summer kitchen is a result of a full circle of learning.---Build community, don't let go of yourself, and then community will help build you.

 

One of the only two picture I took while we were building it.

See the silly peacock strutting just off to the left of the building?



The other picture I took while we were building the summer kitchen.

I'll have to get copies of the pictures my friends took

 

 



 

 The finished south side with the windows all closed

 

 

The finished north side with the windows all closed.

 

 



The finished north side with the windows all open.

A summer kitchen needs lots of ventilation so it doesn't get too hot

 

Inside looking at the stove. 

Yes, I know it needs blacking but I can't do that until the chimney is up.

 

A bench I found at the dump. 

I cleaned it up, fixed the one broken leg and now I have the perfect counter top for under this window.

 

 

 

The west wall, obviously we need to build shelves and some more counter space.

 



 

A counter my 9 year old niece made just for this space.

Yay! for family and friends!