New Jersey 32, or More Pieces of Fairytale

J.G. wrote to me:

who does the cooking in your house?
who are the people you know who come over?
what do people expect when they come to your house?
who are you to the people in the soup kitchen and the home for waywards?
to the farmer down the road who grows strawberries with mexican labor?
to the kids who accidentally play in your yard?

I cook when I can, sometimes the others. The only one who really doesn't cook much is Arlene, but that's only because she's usually commuting when the cooking is happening. She does make a serious gumbo though, and that comes straight from her grandma. Don't get in her way when she's making gumbo. The cats and I learned that the hard way. Cindy's vegan, and the rest of us are carnivores - Jo keeps kosher, and Arlene and I love bacon. I sometimes test new recipes for the kitchen at the House for Waywards - usually when a new vegetable has just come into season, and we need to use massive amounts of Brussels sprouts or tomatoes or something. I'm the one responsible for our house's weekly potluck contribution, and I usually make something with pasta. I still never make desserts - that's Cindy's thing. I don't know what it is about that woman and vegan cupcakes, but she does something magical to them. She's the most relaxed vegan I've ever met though - she does live in a place where we eat all sorts of meat right under her nose, and she's never complained.

Our house has an open-door policy, with one exception: when Arlene's working on her thesis, she hangs a picture of a stack of books on the door, and that's a sign to stay on the porch, or to knock, if it's an emergency. On any given day, the kids are in and around the house during school hours because of the pottery shed - there's an unspoken rule that says if the kids are learning at your house, you're in charge of lunch. Since our house has the pottery and one of the bigger gardens, the kids have been in and out a lot lately. There's seven of them that belong to us - the community - and sometimes there are more, depending on who's at the House for Waywards.

The House for Waywards originally was supposed to be half writing school, half retreat center. But then Esme started volunteering at the domestic violence shelter (about 40 mintues away), and she came to us proposing to make it a safe house in connection with the shelter, which took forever to reach consensus on, but officially opened to its first family about a year ago. When famlies come in, the neighborhood trickles in like a welcome wagon, bringing food, company, support. We invite them to be a part of the neighborhood while they're around, which usually takes awhile, but that makes sense. We've had about four families since, and we've been lucky that most of them have been really open to us - their kids sometimes join ours for school, and it was one of the moms who stayed there that started the soup kitchen idea. It's not a traditional soup kitchen, because street folks don't usually get out as far as we are. Instead, we make meals and deliver them to shelters and hangout spots around the area about once a month.

Rebecca works as a counselor in connection with the women's shelter, and serves as the social worker for some of the families that come through, and is on call as the emergency contact for the families that come in. She's working to expand the soup kitchen into a small catering business, since we have less time for the corporate retreat guys, less money coming in.

As to the farmer down the road who grows strawberries with Mexican labor...it's complicated. We're neighbors, in the way people have to be neighbors when there's no one else around. Maria delivered his wife's second kid during a blizzard three years ago. When his pickup was the only thing to get through the mud last April, he took Jo to the hospital when she broke her ankle. He offers us boxes of strawberries during good years in exchange for asparagus and raspberries. But the relationship is exactly just that - neighbors, only in the most superficial circumstances, and the most dire ones. I don't like to admit it, but I keep an eye on him, watch for any signs of him treating his workers badly. I don't know how or how much he pays them. Sometimes, I see him out in the fields with a pile of water bottles on the back of his flatbed, passing them out. He speaks Spanish well, and all the workers wear the same wide-brimmed straw hats for sun protection. I don't know where they stay or live. He brings them in on the truck every morning.

We've talked about it at neighborhood meetings - is it our business? If there's no signs of abuse, do we have a moral obligation to report him for having undocumented workers? Is it our obligation to confront him about it? Esme's dead against it - her dad was an undocumented worker in California for years, and thinks nothing good will come of reporting him. It'll only mean that his workers get deported and he'll just bring in more where they came from. Henry says we should try and talk to the workers, to see if he's paying them a useful wage. Jo says our relationship as neighbors is a delicate balance that must be maintained for everyone's good, because if we can't count on our neighbors, who can we count on? Meanwhile, I walk past his place ever week - it's not far past the House for Waywards - and keep my eye out, telling myself if I see or sense something I don't like, I'll bring it up. To someone.

In the meantime, his kids play with ours - not often, as they go to school in town - but they know the rules (no playing in the yard of someone who's not home, only big kids are allowed by the stream alone, no touching the kiln, the power tools or using the kitchen without permission), and they generally get along well with the others. Jo rounded up the kids last week to stack firewood and, after some complaining, turned it into a race, full of shrieking and giggling by the side of the house. They sounded like they were having so much fun that Arlene actually put her book down and headed outside to join them. After a quick rinse-off in the stream, they came thundering into our house, dug into the fridge for the pitchers of iced tea on the "guest" shelf (sweet tea for Arlene and Jo, just lemon for me and Cindy), and spent the afternoon digging through Jo's collection of comic books that span all the way back to 1992 and debating the merits of Spiderman vs Batman vs Superman and the Hulk.