In which our heroine wins an argument with her mother
It all started before I was born, when my
mother hopped in a VW bus with some friends and drove south from her
Massachusetts home to join a commune.
"It wasn't a commune," Mom said, correcting my
wording just like every other time I'd ask her about Greensun.
"And I wasn't a hippie."
"Sure you weren't, Mom," I'd either say or think,
depending on how nice I was feeling at the moment.
"It was an intentional community," Mom reiterated
a week before I ended up stranded in West Virginia. The flier
that had restarted this conversation hit the trash can as Mom
continued her historical whitewashing. "You can call it a
community land trust if you want, but not a commune."
I wasn't buying it, but I knew what Mom was
trying to say with her adamant denial of hippiedom—she hadn't
smoked pot (supposedly) and I'd darn well better not either.
That message was coming through loud and clear, so I decided to
humor my mother on the semantics issue. "Sure,
Mom. You spent a solid year living in an intentional
community. Got it."
I'd been begging to visit the Greensun community
since I could pronounce words of four syllables, but Mom never saw
any reason to fly across the country to grant my wish. Never
mind that my biological father still lived there (I thought) and
that I've never met him.
(Oh, yeah—I'm a love child. Still not a
hippie, Mom?)
"You think you want to go there now, but you
really don't," Mom replied. (I decided to let it slide that my
mother seemed to think she knew my wishes better than I did, so I
stayed silent.) "When I left, there were plastic doll heads on
all the fence posts. Your father said they scared away
deer, but they mostly just scared away people. Very
creepy."
"So, I'll wear my doll-fighting gear," I
said. "No problem. I'll even bring a wooden stake if
it'll make you feel better."
Mom smiled despite herself. "Forsythia—" (Naming your child after a flower—another sign of
being a hippie. Just saying.) "—Do you really want to
spend your Europe money visiting an abandoned commune?"
At this point, I couldn't hold my tongue any
longer, so I crowed: "Ha! You admit it's a commune, which
means you're a hippie!"
Mom plowed right past that remark and continued
trying to talk me out of my plan. But even though I yes'ed
and no'ed appropriately, I was already at Greensun in my mind.
I
hope you enjoyed this second installment of Forsythia's adventure. Stay
tuned for another chunk of her story tomorrow, or download the entire
ebook of Watermelon Summer here.
| This post is part of our Watermelon Summer lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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