I went to a wedding two weekends ago and met up again with my enthusiastic mentor; coyote. I’ve been minding my own business, working from dawn till dusk like a good girl with protestant work ethic, and along came an entire pack of coyotes. The nerve!
I wish I had a heroic story to go along with my sad news but I don’t. I wish I had been wrestling a wild boar in the wilds of the Pennsylvania hardwood forest, but I just happened to be picking up a toddler, we both tumbled over and I broke my finger. Don’t worry though, he’s fine. I’m the miserable workaholic who suddenly has her fix taken away from her.
I had planned to answer Ryan’s question- if you’ve read his comment at the end of the last essay (if you haven’t, go read it, and all his comments) and I had planned to respond to a text from a good friend who read my essays. They asked about community in the text. I planned to address that in an essay as well. But, I’ve broken my finger and it takes twice as long to do everything as before. My workaholic lifestyle has been slowed down by force. Typing really bothers my whole arm, and I suspect I agitated my elbow injury with this fall. Sadly, this is the second year in a row that I haven’t been able to work myself to death in the summertime and if I’m honest, I’m really angry about it. I have plans! I have to garden! I have to carve! I have to paint the exterior of the house! I have to work on my workshop. I have too much to do, actually. It’s definitely too much for one person, especially if it takes me 10 minutes to carefully change the bandage on my (dominant) hand without bumping my poor little finger tip or making it throb for an hour afterwards. Baby steps.
This whole ordeal is shifting my perspective and bringing into focus a few things I’ve really struggled with for probably about 10 years. I’ll focus on one for the time being; Community. It has been a huge issue for me, and as I sat in the ER waiting for the x-rays to come back at 3 AM with my mother (thanks for driving, Mom!). All I could think about is how alone I felt. I’m one of those people who has a lot of different friend groups and swoops from one to the other. After college I was friends with the punks, the trans folks, the mennonites, and the hippies. I’ve always loved everyone. I’ve always been that friend; not part of any one group but everyone shouts my name at the party when I walk in. Or at least that’s how it was when I was younger and living in a small city. It’s very different in a rural area. Most people in my demographic move away from here and don’t come back. Over the years, I’ve neatly filled that vacuum with work and endless projects. It’s very easy to do when you live on a farm and are self-employed.
Maybe I’m not qualified to reflect on community, except to identify how important it is because I feel the need for it. One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is how much a workplace is a great example of what a real community is. Honestly, I think the term “community” is often misused. In terms of rural living, I think of community as the people who surround you geographically or locally. That’s a community. You don’t get to choose who is in it. You have to learn how to get along with people whose personality might be wildly different from yours or someone who hurt you in the past or who gossips. Someone who voted for the right liar or the wrong liar. You know, humans.
Friends are what people want to think of as community. But they are a smaller subset of community, and you choose them. Those are the folks who share common interests or whose personalities you like. They get you and you get them. Community creates the environment for friends. In the past, before the internet, people in “the community” did things that brought them together. I remember my Grandma Umbel telling me when she was a little girl she clogged the heels off her shoes dancing. She didn’t do that alone in her room for a tiktok reel. She was at a community celebration and I’m sure there were people there who she liked and didn’t like. But the point is, she was participating with everyone whether or not they aligned completely with how she or her parents viewed the world.
So, it might be a bit of a stretch, but the silver-lining to yet another arm/hand injury is that I’m spending more time engaging with people. I literally can’t grasp a carving knife, or add to my garden. I can’t use the weed eater. I’m back where I was last year...but this time I’m visiting friends on the weekends and being intentional about building some friendships within my community...something I’ve completely neglected for 10 years.
I hope you are able to do the same especially with folks you didn’t expect to. That’s how community becomes stronger and you grow together; one broken finger at a time.
I've been thinking a lot about community lately as well. When I left church years ago I almost immediately missed the forced relationships with people I would otherwise never talk to. While I think organized religion is largely harmful, there are benefits that are hard to replicate. We don't have really good substitutes in American culture. I agree that the workplace might be the closest we come: a collection of people who didn't necessarily choose each other, but who are working toward a common goal and have to be civil to each other along the way.
The pandemic really brought this into focus for those of us who work in the corporate world. I don't think we office types realized how much we relied on our coworkers to be a community (not a "family," as some companies are fond of saying--yikes). Having that yanked out from under us was jarring. I've read before--I can't remember where, so forgive the lack of citation--that we require concentric circles of social connection to feel healthy. Family/partner, close friends, acquaintances, community. If any one of those things is missing, we feel off center. It's easy to forget that those less intimate relationships are vitally important. At least that's my experience.