mayonaise and sharing

Community is rewarding. Everything to follow should not be without the acknowledgment of the comment i've just made.

Living in community is hard.
Have I said THAT enough yet?

I have had friends who comment that the shared-groceries part of community may challenge more than any other part of shared living. For the most part I disagree with this comment. We do pretty well with sharing food. (Maybe my carnivorous housemates are getting sick of the meatless-ness in our house...but I will naively take their lack of complaints to mean they are doing ok and would agree with me here.) Is it really so hard to share food? All of us grew up sharing foods with our siblings and parents. Is it so different to share with a franken-family?

Our bigger problem is buying enough food rather than buying foods we all like. Perhaps sharing food is easier when there's not enough money to be selective.
Having said that, we are immensely blessed and are continually provided for.

We have little tricks up our sleeve to make this whole grocery thing work.
1.) We are loved! (the broader community has been so giving! Just the other week we received anonymous gift cards to the local grocery store. I can't thank you enough, whoever you are!)
2.) Bent and Dent discount stores. Yes, discount grocery stores are a bit of a gamble and sometimes you'll return home with a fifty-cent find that tastes stale or rancid enough to be a waste of money, but for the most part our discount purchases of past expiration cereals or dented cans of beans have been marvelous and have served us well.
3.) Sam's club. Sam's club is a great place to buy anything in bulk. Well...anything you want in bulk. It wasn't until after I recited our entire grocery list to my housemate while he was at Sam's Club, that it occurred to me we may not have a use for 3 pounds of mayonnaise. Bulk rice is a good thing. Bulk soy milk is a good thing. Bulk mayo.... oops.

I think it's a good thing to need sometimes. It's good for us to need the generosity of others.
I also think it's a good thing to share.
I don't think I need to explain that one too thoroughly. We all agree that sharing is better than not sharing...right?

But how many of us really get the opportunity to share that often? In this day and age we have very individualized lives. We have our own cell phones, our own closets full of clothes we never have to share if we don't want to, and our own rooms often times.

As for me, I love sharing and I love that in this house, we NEED to share. We don't even have to discipline ourselves in that way. It's just a necessity. I may add it's teaching me so much...and I recommend it.

I dare you to share something you've been protective of with someone. Maybe a laptop or a cell phone or an I-pod, or you could start smaller and share your food or your time.

...is time really a smaller thing to share?...

anyway. Thanks for sharing in my thoughts :)