On Building Community

On Memorial Day, I joined a meet-up group for a nine-mile hike in the southern part of Rock Creek Park. I had been wanting to do more hiking but didn’t know where to start, so it was an awesome way to jump in. It was a great group of people, and when we stopped for a lunch that I hadn’t packed for, my fellow hikers shared theirs.

After an iced latte and some time in the air conditioning, I headed out to the community garden to continue preparing the soil for planting, hard but satisfying work. In the process, I met the woman in my neighboring plot, a nice older lady who gave me a thumbs-up and told me I was doing a good job. When she saw me awkwardly balancing my camera on my bag to take a self-timer picture of myself in action (because I’m a huge dork), she offered to take one for me and the result was this great photo.

All in all, it was a day that made me thankful for the kindness of strangers.

My Catholic elementary/middle/high school ascribed to five goals of the Sacred Heart that infused almost everything we did. This spring, I went to an alumnae retreat themed around the goals. In a breakout discussion of Goal IV, “the building of community as a Christian value,” I talked about the challenges of building community in these post-college years. In a school setting, you work and play (and sometimes live) with the same people, and you are embedded within a framework of shared values—whether it was the goals at Stone Ridge, or the international/environmentalist/ ethos of Middlebury. Now, I have great friends from high school, college, and work, but with everyone spread out across DC and across the country, it’s harder to identify my “community.” (Though with a shared mission and lots of awesome people, my work comes close to one.)

One of the alums, a few years older than me, commented, “Building community doesn’t have to be one big party.” It happens in the individual interactions – in strengthening friendships, reaching out to acquaintances, being kind to a difficult person at work. That was a lightbulb moment for me, and I’ve thought about it ever since.

I was happy to realize that what happened on the hike and in the garden was community-building in the true spirit of Goal IV – one individual interaction at a time.

The Commuting Gardener

For the second year in a row, I’m gardening at the Mamie D. Lee community garden by the Fort Totten metro station. Having my own organic garden has probably been my longest-running dream (it was always part of the dream that it would be organic). I remember playing “farm” in the backyard as a kid and telling high school dates that I wanted a garden.  Middlebury had an organic garden that you could volunteer in, but for whatever reason I never did. After college, though, I followed that dream to Turkey to go WWOOFing on two organic farms. It was definitely one of my favorite things I’ve ever done, and it gave me a real-life taste of farming.

Last summer, back in DC with time and a little income to spare, I dove right in. I took an awesome class at the Mamie D. Lee garden through an organization called the Neighborhood Farm Initiative. In biweekly classes, they walked us through all the steps of creating a garden, and they supplied us each with a 12x12 plot, compost and wood chips, seeds and seedlings, straw and bamboo. They set up an irrigation system so you didn’t even have to worry about watering. It was great to have all that information and support as I jumped into gardening... and now I am totally, totally obsessed.

This year, I’m flying solo with my own 12x24 plot – twice as large as last year! During the class, I didn’t have to do much supply gathering. So this year has come with lots of start-up work – clearing the plot of cover crops and turning the soil, hauling compost from Lowe’s, buying seedlings. My dad provided the car and the sweat equity to transport the compost (thanks Dad!), but since then, I’ve been schlepping my garden supplies and my baby seedlings by public transit. (As I was struggling through the turnstile on the way to the garden from Home Depot, a Metro employee struck up a conversation about my jalapeno seedlings and whether I was planting too late in the season. It was fun to talk shop, but not a good time, dude.)

Growing your own food is a pretty magical thing. Like every other yuppie/hipster, I hate that so much of our food is trucked from so far away and grown with so many chemicals, and I love that my actions can make a (very) small difference. My only carbon footprint will come from carrying the vegetables back on the metro to my apartment, the same route I came with them as seedlings.

Community gardening definitely some drawbacks—when I got my plot this year, it was full of trash and garden junk, including some buried sunglasses. And I look forward to having a house one day and gardening in my own yard. It would be awesome to walk out my back door with a cup of coffee to check on my plants, or to plant strawberries and asparagus and invest in summers future.

But mostly, I love the community aspect. In addition to the trash in my plot, there were also beautiful strawberry plants producing beautiful strawberries, along with garlic and mint and lettuce, all planted by a previous plot-holder and now being eaten by me. There are wheelbarrows, compost bins, and other tools on-site. If I ever need help, there’s lots of support from a diverse group of gardeners much more knowledgeable than me. It’s pretty cool to be part of a diverse space growing food sustainably in the nation’s capital.

Now that I have some knowledge and experience under my belt, I am excited to learn from my past mistakes and to see what I can grow this year. I am so excited to see what this summer in the garden will hold.

A Clear Midnight

I was at the office late the other night, and walking back through Chinatown to the Metro, I flashed back to walking back from the library at college after it closed at 1 in the morning. Up the hill towards Mead Chapel, stars above and mountains behind. In my memory there's snow on the ground, which is more accurate than not, save for those few precious warm nights in September and May. A college campus is never completely deserted, but that walk was always quiet, and it gave me a few moments alone with my thoughts between studying and bed -- "away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done."

So much of the college experience is about the people you're with -- the professors whose words you remember more than any book they assigned you, the friends you drank with and played Quidditch with and were silly in the dining hall with, and all the other classmates who formed the backdrop. So much of what matters to us about places in general is the people in them. So it's nice to remember a little pocket of the college experience that was just mine.