First Pictures

by Dana Snyder-Grant

Part of my life these days is lived on a construction site. The building of my home and twelve other homes will nearly complete the twenty four household cohousing community that we have been planning for six years. The finale will be the raising of our common house. We are all land owners, developers, and buyers at Half Moon Hill in Acton, Massachusetts.

After these years of helping to create community, I watch my house go up. I have pictures, taken by a neighbor from her kitchen window, of the initial framing. It is an overcast winter day in New England. A wooden framed wall lies on the snow-covered foundation. It is the wall that defines the boundary between our home and our neighbor's home. Five men in work clothes begin to raise the structure. They are lined up in haphazard fashion. A couple of workers have slid their bodies through the wooden studs while their feet are planted firmly on the ground to offer themselves greater strength and power. A sixth worker pushes the frame with a wooden pole that is fastened to the structure at a much higher place than human arms can reach. As they raise the frame, the men become a chorus of prayer. In a horizontal line with their arms outstretched, they push the frame upwards to the sky. As it lifts, their bodies are at opposite angles to the frame. There is human over inanimate power that triumphs here. I look at these pictures and feel beholden to these men who have begun the building of my house that I have so long awaited.

Today, four weeks later, this house under construction is completely framed. In addition, it has a roof, doors, windows, and siding. It looks like a home. On Sundays, the workers' day off, my husband, Jim, and I visit this house. We measure windows, doorways, distances. Our friends and neighbors who have been through this process have warned us that checking the builders' work is essential. It's not that they are lax or incompetent. But mistakes are made. Through my irritation, I try to remember that we are all human.

One Sunday, our neighbor and friend, Mary, was also on the site to view her home under construction. She came to see our house, and artist that she is, noticed that the bedroom closet seemed unusually small. Sure enough, when Jim checked the construction drawings, we discovered that the closet had been incorrectly framed by a foot and a half. From another neighbor's house, we faxed a note to the architect and informed him of the error. Fortunately, it was corrected a few days later.

There are sequences of workers who enter our home now. I am beholden to more of these men. The framers, the door and window installers, the electrician, the plumber, and the siding company, are becoming intimate with our homes. As the work in one home is complete, the work in the next home begins. When Jim was there last week at seven in the morning, he went inside to leave some special phone wire, given to him by a neighbor, for the elecrician. He reported that men were moving around the home like worker bees, quickly and efficiently.

It has been stressful, building this home, this community. We have been through years of bargaining with lawyers, applying for permits, meeting with architects, struggling at group meetings and watching costs rise. But more importantly, we have been through years of creating friendships and building community. The consensus process by which we operate has asked me to value and assert my wishes, and sometimes to let go of them. It is said that it takes a village to raise a child; it also takes a village to raise hopes and dreams into concrete and wood. Mary saves us from a cramped closet, Pablo gives us network wire, Caryn takes pictures for posterity.

John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, preached to the colonists in 1630 about community. He invited them to "delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body." I have such a community, and a home. I'm just not sure if I live there yet.

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Dana Snyder-Grant has written a book called Just Like Life, Only More So and Other Stories of Illness, that includes many cohousing stories.