Moving soon
Leaving my intentional community
Sharon and I recently installed AC units in our community’s common spaces. As I wrestled with the wings, I thought, this is the last time I will put these god-forsaken units in these windows. My last bit of summer in the house. My last season changeover. I’m moving out at the end of June.
I am cleaning out my closet, selling clothes online, and imagining where my orchids will live in my new apartment. I will move into my partner’s place, which has been my second home for the last five years, but when it’s my first home we’ll hang my art and put my books on the shelves. I’ll set up some of the elaborate cat enrichment activities I see on social media. I’ll be a regular at the coffee shop on the corner. My partner and I will make more sushi. We’ll get married.
But I am leaving the Fireplace, my community of four-and-a-half years. American high schools and colleges offer four-year degrees; in a sense, many people take four years to come of age. You enter as one person and emerge as another. Most graduates feel a blend of joy and dread and grief. They take note of the final mile-markers: last class, last exam, last cafeteria meal, last AC installation.
I moved to the Fireplace at age 27 and I’m leaving at 31. Is there anything significant about that age range? If you’re a woman, I suppose it’s a big deal to turn 30. We shake off the vestiges of youth, grow chin hairs, and wring our hands about biological clocks. It wasn’t the best season of my life, but like every season it had some really great days.
In these years, I let intentional community define me. My discernment on the Camino de Santiago last fall made clear that I didn’t want that anymore, at least not in the same way. So I have to change.
It’s tempting to write a post-mortem about my time at the Fireplace, but since I still live here, it’s too soon. But I also can’t write about anything else.
***
As I sat writing, YouTube played “Our House,” unprompted. The Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young classic might as well be a hymn here. Leslie sang it at an open mic or two. We put it on our Fireplace party playlists. (It’s also on one of the few CDs in Leslie’s car.) We changed the lyrics based on how many feral cats we’d seen lately (“with seven cats in the yard/life used to be so hard/now everything is easy ‘cause of you”). (But actually, it was never easy.)
Lilting, intimate: “I’ll light the fire/you place the flowers in the vase that you bought today.” Does it require explanation? We spent all those nights around our backyard fire, our hair catching the smoke. A neighbor often brought buckets of flowers, and Leslie put vases in every room.
Then the song erupts into this sort-of-goofy chorus about our “very very very fine house.” This is a fine house: every visitor admires the wood panels, the double staircases, the sprawling yard, the personality of the place. It’s almost too good to be true, so a bit of goofiness is appropriate. When it is good, it is very very good. Running up and down these stairs, I have been very very very joyful.
(Sometimes beauty is wallpaper. Even in the toughest and tensest times, people have come to the Fireplace and remarked how peaceful they felt. It is easy to be a guest.)
“Our House” is something of a sad song too. Or at least it’s bittersweet. Maybe it’s the fragility that makes me want to cry. The specificity: the flowers that you bought today. Specificity is fragile because it ends.
***
An old friend got married a few weeks ago. She and her now-wife held their wedding rehearsal in the Fireplace yard.
The day before the rehearsal, Leslie came over to prep the yard with me. Leslie lived at the Fireplace for years. As I said, tipsy at her moveout party last year, there would be no more Fireplace without Leslie. We raked, swept, and weeded our way across the patio, which revealed paving stones that hadn’t seen the light of day in years. We took wheelbarrow loads of leaves to the compost pile, arranged the furniture, and hosed it all down. We laughed and gossiped about our lives. Doesn’t this remind you of 2022? I said.
In the spring of 2022, two of our other friends got married in that yard. It was a queer wedding, too, and another Catholic/Protestant combo. 2022 was a simpler season. The Fireplace was bright and youthful. The residents – including me and Leslie and Sharon – were still getting to know each other. I’d lived there for six months. In preparation for the wedding, we cleaned the yard, learned hymns, set the altar, and laid the table. When we tell the community’s story, that wedding is a mile-marker. There were a dozen guests and a ring-bearer cat. It was the first “big thing” we did all together. It set the tone for years to come: the Fireplace would be queer-affirming, ecumenical, scrappy, and sincere. We’d mark milestones together.
Later, it got harder. Two years ago, in June 2024, Leslie, Sharon, and I were the only ones left. The Fireplace was half-dead and half-empty. A bad summer. I never thought we’d see a second wedding.
But two years later, we were back – after a whole second season of the Fireplace. Most of the cast turned over. Leslie moved out a year ago, I’m leaving soon, and Sharon is staying. For a handful of us, the wedding was a bookend. For the Fireplace, I hope it’s just the turn of a season.
