You go downstairs and one of your housemates has made tea and fresh granola. You grab a cup and a bowl, add honey to the first, yogurt to the second and have a quick breakfast. The only thing that would make the meal better is toast, but someone snapped the handle off the toaster a few days ago and nobody has figured out how to fix it yet.
You don’t have anything planned today. You decide to take the toaster to the local makerspace and try to reattach the handle. You dump the crumbs in the garden and head out.
On the way you notice people working in their gardens, sitting on their porches, making music, reading books or just playing with kids and dogs. Nobody seems in a rush.The man at the corner is doing something heavy and sweaty toward the front edge of his garden. He is also beaming with pride. “Would you just look at these garlic heads,” he says when you wave to him. “I planted them last fall and they've taken off!” He offers you one of the biggest heads of garlic you’ve ever seen. You thank him, stick it in your bag and continue on your walk.
The makerspace is a big room full of work benches, speciality tools and scrap parts. In one corner two teenagers are repairing a skateboard deck. You remove the handle from the toaster, then start to sort through different kinds of glue, looking at other people’s notes and trying to plan the necessary repair. One of the 3d printer guys comes over and asks if you need help. You explain about the handle. He says he’s pretty sure he can print you a whole new mechanism. He helps you look up the make and model of your toaster and, yes, someone else has had the same problem and uploaded a design to the server. He adds the piece to the queue and tells you it should be ready sometime tomorrow afternoon. You thank him and he waves it off. “I just love any excuse to run that thing,” he tells you self-deprecatingly. “If you break some more appliances please bring them in!”
You leave the toaster on a storage shelf and toss the broken handle into a bucket of junked parts. Anybody else who comes into the space is free to use it for a project or an art piece. You don’t imagine it’ll be useful to anyone but people are so creative these days they astonish you.
Walking home you decide to go by the park. You know that’s where co-ops set up and it's always fun to walk by and see what they are up to. Sometimes they have music, face painting, balloon animals, bike repair classes, hair cuts, toy swaps or big group art projects. Today it's a simple food distro. As you're going by you notice they’ve got lots of spinach. The spinach in your garden hasn’t been growing well this season, so you grab some and talk to the woman who grew it. She offers you some tips.
As you’re talking a man comes up and asks about milk. The distro doesn’t have any, sorry. You point him toward the Union Dairy up the road. They can probably connect him with someone who has a surplus or needs labor. The farmer your house partners with even delivers! He thanks you and heads off up the street.
When you get home you toss the spinach in the solar fridge and the garlic in the cold cellar. Just then your other roommate comes into the kitchen with her two kids. They’re headed to the library. You decide to go with them.
On the way you all stop to pick and eat raspberries from one of the pick your own bushes that line the walking path. They aren’t quite ripe, but the occasional sour mouthful makes the rest of the berries taste sweeter. The smaller child makes a mess of her face and your roommate scrubs it off with a rag wet from the nearest drinking fountain.
At the library the kids take off into the children’s section and your roommate follows them. It's surprisingly busy for this time of day and the desk looks swamped. You’ve volunteered here before and know their system. You grab a couple of carts and start reshelving books to help out. After a while the rush passes and you're able to go to the desk and get your holds. You also offer to pick up any shifts next week if they’re feeling overworked. The man who does the scheduling mentions that they’ve been having more visitors just before lunch lately. Maybe the nicer weather? Anyway, it might be time to arrange for more help. He’ll bring it up at the next meeting.
You venture into the children's section and find your roommate. The kids are both smashing plastic dinosaurs together rapturously. You offer to watch them for a while if she wants to go browse. She takes you up on that and comes back ten minutes later with the next two books in the cozy mystery series she likes. The kids grab some books about princesses driving monster trucks and you all head out.
Sorting through your holds you realize one of them is a copy of a movie you and your friends have been wanting to see. You peel off from your roommate to swing by a friend's house. Her uncle has just gotten done making empanadas and offers you some. You accept and sit down to lunch with her household. Her mother has been obsessed with microbrew lately and descends on you with glasses of beer to try and discuss. After three, your friend manages to fend her off and take you out to her workshop.
She’s a big techie and the room is full of scattered computer parts and the smell of solder. You show her the movie you got and ask her if she’s got her big projector fixed. She doesn’t, but she knows what she needs to do. She can have it done by Friday. You can show the movie to all your friends in the backyard. You already have an idea of which friends will bring food or drinks, which will help set up and clean afterward. You yourself think you’ll pop up a bunch of the popcorn you helped harvest last fall. She gets started on the repair. You start contacting people through her computer.
You’ve walked a lot so you borrow a yellow bike from one of the public racks and ride it home. You plan to do a little digging in the garden. The compost heap needs to be turned over and you can aerate some of the soil you hope to plant next. As you’re working, one of your neighbor’s chickens wanders into your yard. Usually you don’t mind a chicken or two in the garden, they eat bugs, but this one is a frequent offender and she’s making a beeline for the strawberry plants. With a practiced ease you sneak up and grab her gently but firmly under the wings. As you walk her back you bob her around in the air a few times because it amuses you how a chicken’s head stays still when you do that.
Just as you lock the coop again your neighbor comes out and apologizes. She doesn’t know how that one keeps getting out. You offer to come over tomorrow and help her reinforce her fencing. You know she has a bad back that makes heavy chores like that difficult for her. She takes you up on the offer and you arrange a time. You also know she’ll send you home with even more eggs than she dropped off last week.
She mentions she’s on her way to the Really Really Free Store. Do you want her to keep an eye out for anything? You tell her no, but ask her if she could drop off a bag of clothes you’ve recently purged from your closet. She agrees and you run back to your house to bring them to her.
Bag delivered, you decide to take a nap in the hammock in the backyard.
When you wake up, your roommate has made dinner. He used the spinach and garlic you brought home, hope that’s okay. You assure him it is and have three helpings of the quiche he made. He mentions he’s going to a music jam tonight and asks if you want to come. You thank him, but there’s a baseball game tonight you want to see. You help him clean up the kitchen and then grab some apple chips and roasted peas in case you get hungry.
You take the bike to the baseball diamond. A nearby rewilding collective is playing against the local Black Cross. You get there just as the first pitch is thrown in.
The woman in front of you offers you some of her lemonade and you accept it, offering your dried snacks in return. Her wife plays shortstop for the Black Cross and they are doing great! You cheer and whoop as the game goes on. The rewilding collective all look strong but they’re more interested in chatting then focusing on the game. The Black Cross crushes them.
After the game the woman takes you down to the field to meet her wife. The two teams have decided to go out and celebrate together. The women invite you along, but you’re getting tired. You decide to head home.
Just as you turn to leave, one of the collective recognizes you from an old study group you were in together. You shake hands. You haven't seen each other in ages. He extracts a promise from you to come to the collective’s next prairie burn. You’ve never been to one of those. The notion makes you a little uneasy. He notices and assures you they’ve got lots of experience doing it safely. It’s just hard and sweaty and difficult to get volunteers. “It’s totally worth it though. When you come back and see the prairie healthy and full of animals and know you had a hand in that you’ll be back every year.”
You finally agree and think you’ll try to talk a friend into coming with you. You swap contact info and then say goodbye.
It’s a little dark to ride so you leave the bike in the rack at the baseball diamond. Someone else will use it tomorrow. You toddle home, planning to curl up in your room with a good book before sleep. It’s darker than it was when you were a child. Fewer headlights, streetlights, and neon signs. But the stars are coming out bright and clear through the healing atmosphere and you know the way home by heart.