Living in community
Being new to country life, we didn’t realize how magical it is out here. The evening light and the quiet once the Bodega traffic dies down, the wildlife and starry nights - all of this was new to us, but not a surprise. What was a surprise, though, is the way of life out here - the bonds between neighbors, the systems in place to avoid waste, the way neighbors would rush over to help me shoo out a lizard or capture a black widow, the looking out for each other during wild windy storms, the knocking on each other’s doors to drop off some extra plants or a slice of pie. We don’t buy things we can borrow from a neighbor. We actually actively reduce, reuse and recycle, in community. We had kind neighbors before, it’s just that we were so busy with the hustle and bustle that we didn’t get to know people right on the other side of the fence of our postage-stamp lot. Here, there’s more work but the pace is slower. The dilemmas of land stewardship are more complicated, but somehow the lifestyle is still simpler. The people are more spread out, but we know them better. We will walk across an acre to greet a neighbor when we see him off in the distance, on the other side of the fence, and he will do the same.
We thought this was kind of a big deal, but for those who are used to it, it’s just a way of life. Case in point: the house behind the D’Eggery has a bunch of horses. In preparation for a sheet mulching project, we asked the owner if we could use any of her manure or old straw. She didn’t think twice about it - while her manure is used on the farm next door, she gladly offered her old straw. She even loaded up her truck and dropped it off for us.
We were so happy with our new connection and impressed that her refuse was going to be put to good use growing food and native plants for the community - that we wanted to write an article about it for this blog. However, she wasn’t impressed. “Mmmm, not seeing anything extraordinary here, sorry to be a buzzkill. Stuff like sharing old hay for a neighbor’s garden or manure for another’s farm is just how it’s been done in Petaluma, and I’m sure any rural ag town for a hundred years.”
What we perceived as a grand gesture amounted to nothing to her, and others out here, who naturally default to jumping in to help a neighbor. A few miles down the road, where “town” is, there’s a hustle and bustle that distracted us from knowing people, and distracted us from seeing what was just a few miles away - community.
Over the years, Petaluma has grown. It’s become a bedroom community. New people want to move here because they love the new restaurants, walkable downtown nightlife, new music venues and new stores. All of the commercial development has the potential to eliminate what Petaluma used to be, which was an agricultural town, filled with people who are looking out for each other.
Our promise to the old-timers here is that we will do our best to contribute to those traditions that make the rural town of Petaluma a place where helping out a neighbor isn’t even worthy of a story.