Page 23 - C.A.L.L. #27 - Summer 2006

Inviting Anarchy Into My Home more about building community gardens and
NY TIMES 9th March By LIZ SEYMOUR
ON Aug. 1, 2002, I left behind the comfortably
roomy semicircle marked "married-couple
household" on the Census Bureau pie chart and
slipped into an inconspicuous wedge labeled
"two or more people, nonfamily." Having
separated from my husband of 28 years the day
before, I opened our three-bedroom 1927
Colonial Revival house to a group of men and
women less than half my age. Overnight, the
home I had lived in for 12 years became a seven-
person anarchist collective, run by consensus and
fueled by punk music, curse-studded
conversation and food scavenged from
Dumpsters.
Liz Seymour, in white, sitting beneath a
collection of hitchhiking signs, began an
experiment in group living at age 52. Five of
her six housemates are pictured; the youngest
is Skye Tull, 6.
Now, faced with the prospect of becoming a 52-
year-old single mother to a teenage boy and the
challenge of supporting us both, I panicked. Trying
to imagine how I could make it work, I found my
mind turning to a collective house in Oregon where
Isabell, my older daughter, had lived the summer
before, and to a group of young anarchist artists
and musicians in Greensboro whom I knew
through both of my daughters.
After Isabell came home from college an anarchist
herself, I began to put aside my preconceptions
about these people — as disorderly, violent and
destructive — and to see them as a community
dedicated to replacing hierarchy with consensus
and cooperation. (Isabell once described them as
Quakers who swear a lot.) Over time I found myself
drawn to their hopeful view that people know best
what is best for them and to their determination,
naïve or not, to build a better world right away.
Anarchism, at least as practiced here, seemed to be
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making your own fun than about black bandannas
and confrontations with the riot police (although it
was about those things, too).
Amid the chaos of my own life I wondered if this
approach to living might have something in it for
me. Unconventional as it was, I figured it couldn't
be any worse than struggling to pay the mortgage
and being Justin's mother on my own.
So Justin and I entered a microeconomy in which it
is possible to live not just comfortably, but well, on
$500 a month. When we pooled our skills in our
new household, we found that we had what we
needed to design a Web page, paint a ceiling or
install a car stereo. Sharing services and tools with
people outside the house saved us thousands of
dollars a year.
Every Sunday it is someone's turn to fix dinner
while the rest of us sweep and mop, with Al Green
or the Pixies blasting from the kitchen stereo. Since
the dining room has been turned into a bedroom
(as have the downstairs study and a small upstairs
room that was my office), we eat on the screened-
in side porch or in the backyard under the crape
myrtle tree when the weather is warm, or around
the kitchen table or in the living room when it is
cool.
On Tuesday night we hold the weekly house
meeting. It is surprisingly helpful to know who has
a headache, who just fell in love, who is sleepy.
More than one set of roommates have blown apart
over dishes piled up in the sink and wet towels left
on the bathroom floor; then again, so have quite a
few nuclear families. We talk things out.
I have friends who tell me they could not live the
way I do. I believe them. The constant sound of
footsteps on the stairs, the coffee cups in the sink,
the mysterious things in the refrigerator that no one
claims, the sheer intensity some days of so many
personalities rubbing up against one another, is not
for everyone. But then neither are more
conventional living arrangements. For me, a
household of friends — more loosely bound than a
family but tied together by loyalty, affinity and
shared space — satisfies a need for kinship and
companionship that did not end when my family
did.