As Trish and I prepare for our home renovation, due to start this fall, we are doing a bit of purging.  I find it interesting that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more and more minimalist.  It seems to have coincided somewhat with combining households with Trish and with retirement.  In retirement planning, advisors often talk about the three stages you move through financially:  the accumulation years, the disbursement years, and bequest.  “Accumulation” years are your working years, during which you build wealth; “disbursement” years are when you’ve retired and start living off of those investments; “bequest” is when you die and what’s left goes to people and places determined by your will. 

As Trish and I have made that transition from “accumulation” to “disbursement” financially, we seem to have also made a transition from “accumulation” to “disbursement” with material things.  Even though we both have always been more “experience” oriented than “thing” oriented, over 60 years you still accumulate a lot of things.  We’ve decided we want to trim that down now and not leave that to our heirs or, well, whomever might get stuck with cleaning out our final dwelling.  Besides, we just don’t like clutter.  The negotiation comes in when one person’s clutter is another’s prized possessions.  But I digress.

Coinciding with this drive towards simplification is my increasing awareness of the waste I generate and my desire to not send any more to landfills than absolutely necessary.  I pride myself on a weekly garbage can with as little in it as possible.  (Well, unless Trish has been on one of her “trash picking” walks, in which case our full trash can is a public service.)  So, as we purge in preparation for this renovation, we’ve talked a lot about wanting to “rehome” items as much as possible.  Enter the Facebook Buy Nothing groups.

My bestie turned me onto these treasures.  They are hyperlocal groups on Facebook in which you post things you want to give away and/or things you are looking to get.  Everything must be free.  If you want to sell things, there are many other outlets.  This is a site for rehoming things to avoid the trash can.  The area covered is small (maybe five square miles) and you must apply via your address to join.  Wanted items are picked up at the person’s home unless otherwise arranged.  I started using our local Buy Nothing group as I purge and I’ve found an unexpected benefit:  a much stronger sense of community.

Here’s an example.  Over the years, I’ve been a big fan of The Teaching Company.  They sell courses on a huge range of topics.  It started on cassette tapes, moved to CD’s, then DVD’s, and now mostly streaming (although you can still buy DVD’s).  I’d bought several courses over the years, from Understanding Probability to A Tour of the Louvre to The History of the Civil War.  Although I will admit to not having watched every single episode, one long Customer Service call later I was able to secure streaming access to most of the courses I bought.  So, the DVD’s, etc., were really no longer required.  I could have done several things with that pile.  I could have just trashed them.  Big no.  I could have donated them.  But I chose to post them on our Buy Nothing group.  In short order, someone commented that they’d be interested in the whole lot.  I PM’d my address, left the bag of DVD’s outside the front door, and he came and picked them up.  We never even met!  But here’s the thing:  I know that there is some household nearby that is currently enjoying those courses.  And in some small way, maybe because we know each other’s names and he came to my house, we are connected. 

Sometimes it can be more personal.  A different post offered a number of books related to Judaism as Trish and decided to trim our collection.  One local woman came and took them all.  As I was helping her get the boxes to her car, she told me she was so excited to give the flash cards from Trish’s Hebrew lessons to her granddaughter.  That makes the connection even more profound.  Through this little Facebook group, I’ve accessed more of my local community and that makes me feel more connected. 

Community in this country is often built around families, places of worship, and hobbies.  I did not have any children of my own, so I missed out on creating community through interaction with my kid’s friends’ families—probably the largest foundation of community.  When I was affiliated with a synagogue in the Lehigh Valley, I built a very strong sense of community but it rarely moved off the synagogue grounds.  And since my fondest hobbies are reading and writing—both solitary doings—I don’t really get much community through my spare time activities.  I’ve felt that lack of community my entire adult life.  Don’t get me wrong:  I am blessed with a strong group of friends, a great neighborhood where we know and talk with each other, and strong ties within my family and in-laws.  I have just been missing that broader connection to my capital “C” Community like I had when I was growing up.  I’ve been missing that feeling that makes “home” feel like home.

I don’t think I’m alone.  Even before the pandemic, studies have shown that most people didn’t even know the names of their neighbors and had limited connections into their local communities.  The pandemic, of course, has just exacerbated that.  When you don’t feel a connection to your community, you don’t care as much about what happens to others around you.  When you don’t interact with people in your community as whole humans you just see them as different classes of mono-dimensional people—people who drive too slowly or too fast; people who share or don’t share my political views; people who dress similarly as, or differently from, me.  And when we divide the world into two groups of people—those you align with and those you don’t—then we all ended up feeling both alone and threatened at the same time.  That’s just not good!  Healthy communities only happen when people come together.

We all need more community.  Making that happen takes effort and it’s an effort that I’ve honestly not been very good at over the years.  I’m sure that’s contributed to this sense of isolation that I’ve often felt.  Now that I don’t have my “work” community, yet have more time on my hands, I felt I should be making more of an effort to get engaged with those around me.  Old habits die hard, though, and I haven’t made much progress.  However, I can’t believe how much joy I have gotten out of participating in this Buy Nothing group!  The thought of knowing that little pieces of me are now in multiple homes in the area somehow makes me feel more a part my “new” hometown (that I’ve now lived in for six years!).  It’s a start.