After growing up in a village in Ohio, I moved and travelled for the next sixteen years: living on a square rigged sailing ship, living on a farm in France, going to college on the East Coast (studying Greek epic and mythology at John Hopkins and Harvard), being a carpenter in Berkeley, going to Acupuncture school on the East Coast and in England. When I arrived in Belfast 24 years ago, I found home in this mid-coast community and haven’t left. I began my private practice in Acupuncture and love my work more now than ever, restoring balance so that my patients can live in harmony with the changing of the seasons.
I lived in Brooks (12 miles inland from Belfast) on 50 acres when I was married for 14 years. We had two incredible children and heated with wood and solar, had big gardens, freezing and canning for the winter. Growing up I spent a month every summer on my grandmother’s farm in upstate New York where the relatives would gather to plant, weed, harvest, can and make cider together. I have happy memories of canning bushels of peaches, each of us with our special job, in the potting shed with two stoves and two canners going, and peach juice running down my arms.
I moved to Belfast nine years ago, which was perfect for my kids to walk to school and have my house be a place where kids gathered after school and on weekends for sleepover parties. With my youngest now in college, my suddenly quiet house is a good place for me to write. I’ve been writing poetry for decades, have published tow books of poetry and help organize the annual Belfast Poetry Festival. I’m now in a low residency MFA program in Creative Writing writing a prose memoir about growing up as a modern architect’s daughter in the 60s.
My children are Gabe Baldwin (23) who graduated from engineering school and n now works as a consultant in Energy Conservation in new construction in the Boston area. My daughter Miriam Baldwin (19) is studying International Relations at Tulane University after spending last year living in Spain.
Now I yearn to be in the country again, to have large gardens with others, without having to drive far. The wisdom of the Belfast Cohousing community’s vision slowly seeped into me after hearing about it for the last year. I’ve been part of several kinds of communities. I lived in group households in my 20’s, volunteered at the Berkeley Free Clinic for years, and was involved as a parent for seven years and as director for three years at The Toddy Pond School, a parent run school, when it was a thriving K-7 school with 36 students and 25 families. I’ve lived in a condo of four units the last 9 years, where we work well as a team, maintaining our 1850s beautiful old house. In the cohousing community, I envision weeding with friends, canning with families in the Common House, clearing brush along the stone walls, like being with my cousins, as part of creating a new extended community.
