Kitty's Dream House part I

My dream house is still within reach... To quickly recap my housing crisis, my sister lives in my tiny, non-conforming "existing structure;" which is one reason why I don't live there. Yes, we tried a few years ago to share the 280 square feet but it just didn't work out. Another reason why I don't live there is because it's lonely.

About exactly ten years ago I bought the place because I thought I wanted to be a hermit and get the world off my back. What I found was an elusive dream, a fitful sleep, an encroaching consciousness that no posture was comfortable. I needed people. I ended up at the supermarket in the middle of the night just so I could be with people. I hadn't thought I was such a people person. A Waldenesque lifestyle was what it took for me to find out how much I needed people.

I dreamed of triplexes with common areas so that three families would have built-in community and privacy. And I dreamed of what I think you would call "intentional communities." I think that's the word they use for communities that are sort of like the utopias (utopiae? spell checker doesn't like it) of the 19th century and sort of like the communes of the 20th century but don't hold all property in common necessarily. The communities I'm thinking of are basically cooperative properties with actual land title for each family and an emphasis on community such that meals and activities might be shared. (If this isn't what the hippies are calling "intentional communities" these days then oh, well, I used the wrong word.)

I continued to dream of what are now called "Social Businesses," and the zeitgeist seems to have taken hold; I hope I played an important part, however small and silent, along with hundreds of other dreamers of zeitgeist. And I think I did, because that is how zeitgeist works -- hundreds of dreamers catch (and each individually discovers) a silent and contagious dream before one rises and speaks.

Another dream I had was that of getting the neighbors together to buy up the town's economy on a cooperative basis -- turn that Walmart building into a store of the people, by the people ... take control of supply lines and make sure workers got paid properly. I hope that fed into the zeitgeist that became "Transition Towns" and "Plan C."

I tried to grow different kinds of food, but the ones I got away with were tomatoes and beets.

I'd like to buy the world a home, as the song goes, but I'll settle for being able to build a nice place for my extended family.

I went to hippie camp at Sequatchie Valley, Tennessee to learn how to build unconventional structures for pennies on the dollar. Oh, we built with mud, straw, ferro-cement, sand bags... Ladies, if you want some perky boobs, just spend a couple weeks lifting adobe bricks and such. Ladies, if you actually want to get an adobe house built, get yourself a man, 'cuz it's beyond the average woman's strength and endurance to do this kind of work long enough and hard enough to get anywhere by yourself. I'm still trying to dream up ways a lightweight like me can build her own house. In Israel they dip rags in cement slurry and drape them over lightweight dome frames to cure. In Arizona they mix paper into cement to get very light bricks of "papercrete." I'm still dreamin'.

Next up, I want to tell you about the kind of home I want on my lot, for my family.