Living like my mother

When it is cold and wet I keep a big pot of chi on the stove. I make a new batch every three days. It boils over and making a mess on the stove, but my roommates apparently found it an endearing quality. We have acquired at least one roommate by offering them a cup of spicy honey-laden tea. My mother taught me how to make chi. She did not learn from the internet. She learned from an Indian woman who lived next door to her when my older brother was a baby.

I got it into my head that I should live in a commune at least once during my life. My mother told me about her experiences in a communal house. It seems like she gave me all her dreams about what life can be. I also learned that I never wanted to have children, because that is a lot to give another being.

When I was a child we lived in a little log house and had a huge garden out back where I hung worms on a tree I called a worm tree. I was a heartless child. We had chickens until the raccoons ate them. I cannot remember a time when the moosewood cookbook did not inhabit our homes. I believe I might have been vegetarian as a child but I cannot be sure. I homeschooled until grade five. By the time I got into high school all these things were gone. We moved into an five-plex. Our only garden was on the deck.

I have only lived on my own for a year and a half. It's so short that the halves still count for something. When I moved out I made note to take responsibility for myself. I have took responsibility for my diet and decided to stop eating meat, my health care, my expenses, and all those other things that make some one an adult, so far as I can tell. Every time I reflect I find myself moving towards the life my mother lived when I was a child. My boyfriend convinced me to get a compost program. We both kept little gardens last year and plan to do so again this year. If I get a big enough yard when I move in the summer I plan to keep chickens as well. Someday I will live on a farm. My grandmother commented when my sister stopped eating meat that it seems like it is the thing to do at this age. Mother did it. Sister did it. I'm going it. It's just a phase.

The garden and the chickens, and living in a community of people, not eating meat are all things that my mother did and then stopped doing. It is the same for my boyfriend. Eventually you grow out of it. Eventually you settle down into a normal life. That frightens me. The idea that I can grow out of my ideas frightens me. I will have to work in the great world as Forster calls it and slowly the things I think about what it is to be human and to be me will disappear. I will not live out doors but I will not live in my own home either. Just a impressionless cell. The bright electric lights of a career will make them so hard to see that sometime I will just stop looking. On the other hand I cannot remain a student forever, and some of these ideas I am sure are a product of being a student and young. I will look like a fool if I act the same as I always did. I shall once again be incomplete.