Exploring Home: Community

Home. I’m not sure where it is anymore.

I grew up in Colorado, and although I haven’t been back for more than short visits since 1978, a piece of my heart lives in the Colorado Rockies.

I’ve lived in the Pacific NW since 1987. Northern Idaho, Seattle, the Kitsap Peninsula. When I go back to Kitsap County, that feels like home. My little house is gone, though.

My parents’ house in Northern Idaho was warm and colorful and very close to the outdoors that we could see through the multiple windows. I treasure the memories of sitting in the snowy woods with Myrddin, my aging gold setter, and a flock of chickadees who came to gossip about me in the trees around my log.

Idaho did not feel like home, only that house. I lived there on and off for two years. I found a picture the other day of a snowy lake surrounded by evergreens. I have no idea where it was taken, but it could be Spirit Lake, near where my parents built their house. That picture brought back love of place that I didn’t realize I felt.

The Idaho house was sold to strangers years ago. Life goes on.

I’ve lived in many places in Seattle: thirteen or fourteen different places. Some were pleasant, some not so much. I tend to try to make connection with place; with the woods, the trees, the fields, the water. I felt connection at many of these places, but none of them jump out at me now and yell, “Here. I’m home to you!”

That said, I like the climate and country here. I’ve said Seattle feels like home.

Although I spent ten years in Minnesota, as much of it as possible in the country, I have little desire to go back. I have many memories of being in beautiful places there, but the climate discourages me.

However, there were people in Minnesota, the one place where I really had a lesbian community, who still feel like a bit of home to me. How can I feel such strong connections to people I haven’t seen, except on Facebook, for 25 years? For the most part, these people do not talk to me any more. I’m sure they don’t feel like I am part of their community. But for me, the connection remains. Community is important and the social and political lesbian and co-op communities of 1980's Minneapolis was very much a part of who I was and who I have become.

In many ways, Minneapolis-St. Paul was where I came of age. I came out as a lesbian there. I listened to Women’s Music and became politicized. I learned to be assertive. I lived in cooperative houses, worked in collectives, and practiced consensus decision making until I actually became quite good at it. I worked as an interpreter for the Deaf and in the food co-ops, both jobs I really wanted to be doing. I dated my first girlfriend there. I spent many evenings at the lesbian coffeehouse.

My work in the co-ops was public, and I sometimes passed community news to every lesbian who came into the store. When someone died, when the Peace Camp needed women to stay overnight and maintain a presence, when an anti-porn demonstration was planned, I took on the role of news-speaker, probably to the amusement/chagrin of my less political co-workers.

I went to political meetings, to demonstrations, Holly Near concerts, to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. I was active and passionate and social. We all were.

That community was important to others, too. When a dear, sweet woman died prematurely a few years ago, that old neighborhood came out of the woodwork, collecting on the internet, on Facebook, and reestablishing old connections. While I was very much on the perimeter of that reestablishment of community, I realized how much those women still meant to me, and how much I valued that time. I wonder if that is true of all lesbian communities from the political and idealistic 1980’s?

I’ve had other, briefer, communities that meant a lot to me, some of them before Minnesota, some of them here in Seattle. Coming out as a lesbian, in that time, at that place, was unique, though. For the first time, those quirks of personality that had kept me separate from the non-Queer world were reflected back to me from the women around me. I didn’t have to try to be a woman that I will never be: heterosexual, apolitical, or girly. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn't me. Some crucial parts of me were no longer “Other”, and that was such a homecoming.

I haven’t had much lesbian community in at least 20 years, but sometimes I step back into that world for a moment or two, and it feels so right, so much a part of me.

I don’t have much sense of community now, which has made memories of former communities feel more precious to me.

For me, much of the feeling of home is about place, and there are physical places, former and present, that are very much a part of my psyche, my feeling of self. However, there are neighborhoods of the spirit, times and places where I remember feeling part of the human commonality. My sense of home will always incorporate community, whether past or present.

I guess growing up, coming completely into one’s self, means finding home within one’s heart. There are individuals and communities that I miss at times. There are neighborhoods of ethos and song and thought that are part of my sense of me. I carry them within; I don’t have to look in on those neighborhoods in any physical sense to revisit old pathways to who I have become.

I started this post intending to write about place, about mountains and ocean, about arid Colorado and lush Western Washington. I wanted to explore the call to two such different places, two such dissimilar parts of my heart. The discovery that community, something I feel so little ability to create for myself these days, is part of my feeling of home, is bittersweet. Thank heaven for the memories. No one can take those away just yet.