It's not easy but sharing makes us stronger
PORTLAND, Ore. - The sun shone through the windows of a new farmhouse on an old farm in far southeast Portland one recent Saturday afternoon, where cityfolk ate slightly smooshed but delicious chocolate cookies.
They didn't come for cookies; they came for eggs. Eggs and friends - new and old. Members of the Eastside Egg Co-operative share chickens and chicken-y duties like feeding and coop-cleaning and the eggs that result. At only $60 a year, it's a bargain compared to the cost of free-range, humanely-raised eggs.
But members said they didn't join for the savings. They did it for the experience.
One woman and her husband, who have "freeloading" chickens (they stopped laying several months ago) said they did it to meet people.
Holly McGuire and her partner Patrick Barber didn't live in a home where they could have had a coop when they started the group, but that's not why they did it. It was just a great project, they said.
It doesn't always go as planned. Last year's baby chick delivery turned out to be roosters, save for one.
"They should have been all hens," McGuire said.
There were 50 chicks, and, at $100 for the bunch, they were a substantial investment. Then there was the cost of the mobile coop with bicycle wheels, a beauty built by a local craftsman, as well as the feeders and waterers, the heat lamp for the little ones, the electrified fence, the food.
One member said he just didn't want to take on the responsibility of caring for chickens entirely on his own.
I have my own coop and chickens at home, who loudly give my family four eggs a day, but the co-op's members are all such lovely people that I briefly consider joining them.
Economy not the only reason to share
Financial benefits are only a small part of the rewards. When you share something, whether it's a Skil saw or a bicycle or a flock of chickens, you're consuming less, and you're more likely to buy a quality product that will last through the relationship. When you share things, you often share knowledge too, and the cost of learning seems more manageable when it's not all on one person's shoulders.
Sharing takes people, and often the benefits include other casual sharing, whether it's chocolate cookies an egg a co-op member brought to the quarterly meeting, or the jam I brought to the neighbor who shared his fig harvest with me. Jars lent out full and returned full. Bulbs divided and shared over the fence. A stroller passed on to a younger child. Maternity clothes that cycle among a group of friends, baby after baby. Friendships strengthen and expand as families and flocks grow.
Sharing makes us stronger.
A different kind of Zipcar
It was raining when I pulled up under the awning of a taco cart on 52nd and Foster to meet Lizzy Caston, who shares a car with a friend.
Caston prefers to use Tri-Met or a bike, but today she is batching trips. Her itinerary: She'll drop off a carpet, visit the paint store and another food cart on 82nd - she runs a blog about Portland's food carts - and then IKEA. While she technically owns the Subaru Legacy Outback she's using for the trip, the insurance is in a friend's name, and she rarely uses the car. Her friend uses the car for commuting to her job at Montgomery Park and to graduate school, and Caston uses it only when she has errands to run.
The car-sharing was borne of necessity. Caston had just come back from a year in France, and her car wouldn't start. She was working from home and just let the car sit while she took the bus downtown for meetings and rented a car to go out of town. One day her friend's car was wrecked, and she came to Caston proposing a short-term arrangement: She'd pay to fix the car if she could just drive it for three weeks.
"I said, 'You can have it for three months!' " Caston said, laughing. Their good relationship makes sharing easier, she said. Neither quibbles about the number of miles the other has put on the car or makes a big deal about stuff left on the passenger seat. It's no different, really, than a married couple who shares a car; Caston tells of being sick and insisting that her friend pick up groceries for her and having to learn to accept their differing standards of cleanliness.
While everyone I talk to about sharing believes in it for its many virtues; fiscal responsibility, less materialism, learning together, sharing the risk, living sustainably in an urban setting; all of the arrangements mentioned here happened through serendipity.
Another friend who is an Eastside Egg Co-op member said she met Barber and McGuire at a restaurant and fell in love with their vision. Caston probably never would have gotten into her car share if it weren't for that broken alternator and her friend's sudden need. A woman who shares a garden got thinking when her boyfriend was doing landscaping for a neighbor's overgrown, oversized lot, and volunteered to put in vegetables.
Sharing is not easy
The best sharing arrangements are fluid and set up with general guidelines and fairly prescribed sharing of expenses. Penalties and two-year commitments are for cell phone companies; sharing is about friendship first, things second. Sharing is Utopian; in the best of all possible worlds, we'd all have learned how to share better, we'd use fewer resources, interact more, talk more, listen more.
It's not easy. Those with whom I talked raised any number of fears, problems, worries, concerns, from awkward timing to personal foibles. But no one said they regretted sharing, and everyone said they would share again.