The community I didn't see
The subtle, often taken-for-granted connections that fuel and sustain us
What did you learn that you could not Google? What did you learn the old way?
I don’t mean the state capitals or the number of times the heart beats per minute or how many feet are in a mile or any type of quantifiable knowledge or information.
I mean, what did you learn slowly, on your own, without experts, books, school, or advice?
What did you learn in the old way, through observation, grit, suffering, repetition, desire, necessity, or some combination of all of the above?
I learned to cook this way. How easy and satisfying it is to make stock: just a few leftover leek leaves. Squash peels. The sad, denuded little carrots hovering in the back of the vegetable drawer. An onion with its papery husk. Chicken bones, removing the skin for the dog in her bowl.
How creative cooking is: how it asks you to make magic from three eggs and a can of pinto beans and one tortilla and a meager winter tomato. How the process heals as much as the product.
I also learned community this way. Last week, I texted a mom from our homeschool play group and asked if she’d mind watching Elena at that day’s meetup since I had so much to do to prepare for Mexico. Of course! She texted back. I can drive her home, too.
I dropped Elena off on a twenty-degree, sunny Pittsburgh day at a playground with a mixed-age group of homeschool kids, and she immediately ran off to play tag and smash ice. The mom waved hello and said she’d be in touch when they were leaving, and as I got in my car I recognized this as a kind of holding. My community, lifting me up.
I’m not close friends with this other mom. We only met each other a few months ago. We might not become close friends. But that doesn’t matter.
I understood in this small moment the essence of what we have built here in Pittsburgh: community as a network of relationships, some incredibly powerful, some more distant and removed, some happening only along one axis, but all nourishing and sustaining us.
I’ve long thought of community as something really firm and definitive: the people you talk to every day, the ones you confess your deepest secrets to on long walks, the ones you call sobbing, the ones you pick up from the airport at 4 a.m. The people you have over for messy dinner parties or trust your chickens with.
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