New Jersey 31, or A Piece of a Fairy Tale

The fairy tale doesn't begin at the beginning, but it will end at the end. Because the beginning hardly matters. It gets forgotten by the time you've gotten to the good part in the middle, but no one forgets an ending - happy, sad, cliffhanger, dissatisfying, whatever. This one - this ending - leaves me content enough to fall asleep at night. In fact, sometimes I fall asleep in the middle of the story, just like you're supposed to.

Arlene, Cindy, Rachel, Rebecca, Maria, Esme, Travis, Henry, Thunder, Diana, Esperanza, Michel, and Eirik are my neighbors and housemates. We met at a secret plot to take over the universe that was disguised as a multi-culti community organizer training. Half of us were there, sent by our various nonprofit employers, the other were doing the training. I was there as neither, incidentially - the organizers wanted me to do a poetry set to complement the hours and hours of workshops. After the performance, a group of people lingered, talking in the back of the room, sprawled out over the folding chairs, and I went to join them.

Fast foward to the good part. The part where we live on two long dirt roads in a not-entirely-distant corner of Massachusetts in a bunch of houses that got foreclosed on during the big recession. We'd had this plan, the group of us, to take over a neighborhood in one of the major cities and become a sort of Rainbow-Coalition-Meets-Black-Panthers-Meets-Neighborhood-Watch-Group, but the plan got shut down when Arlene got tenured at the university near here. So we bought the houses collectively, figured out who was living with who (Jo and I were sort of the main couple by then, but we didn't want to live alone, and the others were starting to pair up, and trio up and negotiate all that), and decided the remaining house was going to be the Home for Waywards, which was part guest house, part soup kitchen, part writing school, part counseling center, part corporate retreat center. I mean, something had to bring in money.

Jo, Arlene, Cindy and I got the best of the houses - the one with the biggest kitchen. I painted it blue and yellow, and turned one wall into a chalkboard, for grocery lists and teaching. Cindy built a massive butcher-block table, and it became the center for all our meetings, craft parties, concerts, teach-ins, homework parties and potlucks. Arlene and Cindy got the two downstairs bedrooms, and Jo and I took one of the two upstairs. It was small, but it had the most light, and we were happy up there. Arlene hardly lived in her room anyhow - her research was taking up half the kitchen table, and I sometimes still find her asleep next to her coffee mug in the morning.

My pottery shed's out back. I'm slowly working on learning how to make enough stuff so that we can eat everything from homemade pottery. Henry thinks this is way hippie-dippie of me, and likes to poke fun at my efforts, but that's only because he learned pottery in art school. I'll get him to teach me how to make plates one of these days. The walls of the shed are crammed with projects - at the last planning meeting, the kids decided they wanted to do more work with their hands, so the curriculum this spring is pottery, auto mechanics, gardening and woodwork. I've decided that nature writing counts as an extension of "working with one's hands." Jo just says I'm too much of a wimp to get axle grease and mulch under my fingernails. I threaten to give her a nice scalp massage the next time I come out of the pottery shed, and she immediately backs up a few feet, shielding her perfectly spiked hair as I chase her around the kitchen until I let her catch me by the stove.

In between kisses, she mutters into my neck, "Not when I'm having this good a hair day."