Baked Bean Suppers & Phones on the Wall

A daydream of village life in lieu of Instagram

Today’s the last day of August. Have you been wanting to become a paid subscriber and get a “Poetry is for Rebels” sweatshirt in the mail? It’s your time to shine. Don’t let the sun go down without becoming part of a pretty cool village of people here at The Second Cup. And thank you, a million times over, for the support.

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I’ve found myself daydreaming about the word ‘village’ lately.

I’ve been pining for bean suppers in a small church, for phone calls on a telephone attached to the wall, and for neighborhood kids wandering into the house for popsicles.

I’ve been wanting to bring somebody warm pumpkin coffee cake, and to sit at their kitchen table and drink coffee from the pot and to tap our crossed feet on the floor and to talk, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. As if, in the backs of our minds, we’re not wanting to pull out our phones and check our notifications and see if some stranger, somewhere out in the world, has approved of what we posted earlier this morning.

In my dreamworld, the kids fall asleep in an exhausted heap because they’ve played outside all afternoon with the kids next door. They close their eyes imagining what they’ll build when they come together again tomorrow: a Roxaboxen-esque world of their own, where children make the rules and govern themselves and find that their competence extends far beyond what the adults could imagine or give them credit for.

Here, we all know our place. We have a place. We aren’t working to establish ourselves, we aren’t needing to say, Look at me!, and we aren’t tiring ourselves out by gathering shiny, worthless things that amount to little more than clutter for our souls. We hold tangible things, like our friends’ babies and glasses of wine that glitter while we spin dreams with people who actually listen.

This village isn’t transactional. It isn’t quantifiable. It’s just flesh and blood and flawed people who know each other and bear with each other, and who offer one another whatever they’ve got. It is not glitzy. It is the opposite of curated. Rather, it is a solid place where, at the end of the day, our bellies have a warm settledness. We don’t lay awake worrying, Have I done enough? because we know that we are enough; we have a place in the world cut out for us already, by simple default of living in our village.

And I can’t help but wonder: will this type of life and contentedness only ever exist in our dreams? Or is it possible to cultivate village life again, even when our local Target only has self-checkout lanes now and our number of followers is used to measure our relevance?

We are the products of markets and times and movements that do not want village life for us. They want us to believe that we are not enough and that we do not have enough—for if they can convince us of these things, then they own us. We will keep scrolling and keep buying and keep performing and keep trying to fill the empty, restless pits in our bellies that keep us awake at night and wondering, Is this all there is?

And as long as we keep turning to these systems, we are slaves. Worse, we are