Reminders About Communal Living

Sharing a house with people for a week is a good way to confirm just how you feel about each of them. When you get past the newness of everything and rooms are decided, there are issues of communal living that simply must be addressed -- like who will cook, who will take out the trash, who will clean up, and perhaps most importantly, whether anyone gives a shit if the counters are clean and the trash is emptied. I mean, after all, we’re on vacation!

Fortunately everyone likes clean counters. If there’s a smutz, invariably someone will clean it up. Neal may not approve of the wad of paper towels that David attacks it with, but it will not just go unnoticed.

Bill and I are the ones who like to cook. We have an appreciative audience who are content to show up when food is served and to clean up afterwards. Just the way I like it.

The trash seems to be getting taken out without my help. That may well be Neal, who has also been able to magic up anything we need, such as a broom and dustpan. (We have gone through a prodigious quantity of white wine and managed to break a few glasses.) Neal also shows up with current newspapers each morning.

Mary sets the table and clears it. Deborah makes coffee and unloads the dishwasher. David makes trips to the farmers’ market whenever we need something and is on the clean-up crew. Bill, the gardener, waters all the plants. And so on and so on.

When I lived in a group house in the 70s, it was a royal pain in the ass to get anyone to do anything in the way of cleaning. There were novel excuses, like “I can’t mop the floor because I don’t know how.” I resorted to a job chart that gave each person one of 5 major jobs each week. It failed miserably and I ended up doing some things when my disgust exceeded my level of tolerance.

So as you can see, since the initial issue about who got which bedroom, this week has been the perfect example of communal living. It’s unclear as to whether we could keep this up for more than a week, when politeness might give way to someone feeling like he or she was carrying a bigger load. But for now, I like it. I can cook and have people compliment my food and not feel compelled to do much of anything else.