Jay's home page

Home, household, and community

My household

I live in a wonderful household in Malden (a suburb north of Boston) with Tigris (picture, 17.3k GIF), who is my best friend and something English doesn't have a word for[1], her partner Tom, and our dog Kodi. We live somewhat communally, sharing food and savouring meals together when our schedules allow them. This is my chosen family, and I love them dearly.

The Whimsical Bestiary, our house in Malden

In May 1999 we closed on a big (16-room) house in Malden; we moved in late that summer. We have dubbed the house the Whimsical Bestiary (which I guess makes us the Beasties). It was sad to leave Jamaica Plain, the neighbourhood we lived in for two years, but the new house is really, really nice. I'll gush more about it later, so watch this space.
In addition to the one above, you can see some pictures of the outside of our new house if you like. As you can see in some of the pictures, it has a barn and a slate mansard roof (the flat part, which you can't see, is the standard tar). It was built in 1880. We moved in in August of 1999.

Animal companions

At the beginning of October 1999 we brought home a new dog, Kodi (originally Kojak), from an animal shelter. He's got his own page of pictures, and here's a picture of him stretched out on the couch (13k JPEG).

Until recently, we also lived with Schnapps, Heidi's cat (stretched out, 8k JPEG; curled up, 9.5k JPEG). Schnapps has gone to live with our friends Lisa[2] and Bearpaw. Heidi also used to have two rats, Sydney (picture, 6k JPEG) and Melbourne. Sydney died of cancer in summer of 1995. She was a sweetie, and we miss her. We had to give Melbourne away, but he had a happy and well-loved life in his new home until he, too, died in mid-1997. His adoptive owner, Paul Bickford, has a web page with information about him (and a picture).

If you think Syd and Mel are cute, you may want to check out Sal Nicholson's page, which has more cute rats.

Jamaica Plain

Our old neighbourhood is one of the most vibrant and fun parts of Boston. It has a very mixed population: straight and queer, anglo and latina/o, and all colours of the human spectrum. Despite that - or perhaps because of that - it has a very strong sense of community, of a common identity. There's at least one, and I think several, groups that put on street fairs and celebrations of various kinds, so much more so than in most urban settings, you really get a chance to meet your neighbours. There are some community gardens. There's a lot of grassroots activism around, and it mostly feels like working for things rather than against things, like building things. It's a place that makes me optimistic.

It's also a very green place. There are lots of parks around, including a large arboretum and much of Boston's Emerald Necklace. Franklin Park and the Franklin Park Zoo are nearby, and Jamaica Pond is always a nice place for a walk.

I really enjoyed living there, and although I love our new house and am enjoying Malden and the neighbouring towns of Everett and Melrose, I'll always have a soft spot for JP.

Some JP links

Boston in general

I really like Boston. When I graduated from college, Boston was at the top of my list of cities I wanted to move to. Among the things I like about it are that

Some Boston links

Antarctica

Before moving to JP, Heidi and I lived for two years in a house in Brighton which (for no very good reason, except perhaps that we like penguins) we called Antarctica. The name of my machine (aq.org) comes from the ISO two-letter abbreviation for Antarctica. (Hey, if I knew some of the sysadmins at McMurdo Base, I could get aq.aq and shave a letter off my email address! :-)

Heidi and I enjoyed Brighton, which has a real small-town feel to it (kind of like Malden), but is walking-distance from Central Square, Cambridge (if you like to walk a lot, anyway). One disadvantage was that the MBTA line that serves it (the green line) was pretty slow. We had a lot of people come to our parties anyway. :-)

Calumet community

For two years prior to that, Heidi and I lived in a coöperative household in the Roxbury section of Boston, Massachusetts, with six other people (including Lisa and Bearpaw, whom we lived with again in JP and for a while in Malden) and several allergens.

Acorn Farm and intentional community

As I write this paragraph in February of 1995, I've just gotten back from a trip to visit my friend Ivy (who has since changed her name to Tree), who lives on an intentional community called Acorn on a farm in Virginia. In a lot of ways, Acorn represents things I'd really like in my living situation: it's a fairly large group of people (about twenty then), they work together as well as living together - which makes it a lot easier to find time to spend together -, they do a lot of things for themselves that most people use money for (building buildings, growing food, etc.) but they also have ties to the surrounding community. I'm probably too much of a city boy, and too much of my life probably revolves around the net, to live quite like that, but I hope to bring some of their experience to my own choices about how I live.
[1] We're not lovers, but we are something like life partners. (Lisa tells me it's sometimes amusing to try to explain this to people.) Heidi's wonderful! (And you can tell her I said so.)

[2] Pronounced with a /z/ sound rather than an /s/ sound.

Jay Sekora <js@aq.org>
last modified 2000.05.03