Hearth & Horn

A friend of mine soon due with her second child was bemoaning to me because of Lockdown, unlike her first baby, her mother wouldn’t be able to come stay for a month, she wouldn’t have the daily village visitors bearing gifts, etc. And I was flabbergasted. I feel for her, because those are her expectations, but we didn’t have *any* of that when we had our child. (This is part of that “social cost” I was talking about in another comment.)

> ramblers associations, gardeners, environmental groups, local historians.

This is totally been my husband’s thing when he’s lived in places that had a bit more wild than our current abode. We’re planning to get into that sort of thing, too, when we finally do our move out of the city, but I worry because no matter how much I try, I don’t code as “normal” and stick out awkwardly (it’s worse now that I’m also obviously a foreigner). My partner is a much better social chameleon than me.

> For me, the appeal is very much family. I like the idea of having the same group of people in my life long-term, and creating these alternative communities is a traditional role of religion...

This whole paragraph is exactly what I long for. I have often posited to my partner that we should go in with friends to buy a series of adjoined properties so we can have our own little “village,” but first we have to find those friends XD We sort of had that back in our days in Seattle, but the group was already fracturing around the time we moved across the pond, and since then they’ve all gone to the four winds. Alas. A co-living “village” might have been the only thing that would convince me move back to the States.