The Story of Us

We're busy folks here at Pacific Gardens.  Every week is filled with meetings, gardening, maintenance and cleaning chores, proposals to be developed, agendas to be crafted, and forms to be filled out. The list never grows shorter. It's easy for us to get overwhelmed with our responsibilities, so much so that sometimes we forget what it is that we have achieved in creating this community.

This week we got a wonderful reminder from a new resident, Glenn, who told us he knew immediately that he wanted to live here when he saw the word "cohousing" in our ad for rentals.  He had been interested in intentional communities for a long time, and had followed the progress of several groups that wanted to build cohousing developments.

What impressed him most was that we had actually done it!  He knew of at least five or six proposed cohousing projects that never got off the drawing board, and yet, our little band of dreamers and idealists and activists had managed to create this beautiful building, after many years of effort.

We invested the money from our savings, pension funds, and sales of homes and property, hired architects, construction managers, code consultants, marketing assistants, arranged for construction loans, researched energy-efficient heating systems and environmentally-friendly building materials, and spent hundreds of hours in meetings.

And then three years ago, we got our occupancy permit, and here we are!  As I sit here in my office, I can hear the children in the atrium.  Outside my patio window the dew glistens on the flowers in Susana's garden and on late-ripening tomatoes in the veggie plots of our other enthusiastic gardeners.

The story of us is pretty amazing, as Glenn reminded us. On Saturday we'll be setting out our stall at the annual Harvest Festival held on Wesley Street in Nanaimo from 10:30 am to 3:30 pm.  If you're in town, come on by and we'll tell you more!

Kathryn