Bowers House is the largest of the three Qumbya co-ops, with nineteen bedrooms, six bathrooms, and twenty-odd members at any given time. Our fabulous building is a three-story yellow-brick house with an aging porch (often populated by nicotine-addicted co-opers) and a cute little sign that reads, ‘Where Vegetables Come to Die.’
Step inside, pass through a distinctly Kermit-green hallway, and you’ll find yourself in the foyer, greeted by an enormous chalkboard and our chore-board, where members sign each other off for their chores. Our cozy common room has three couches, bushels of DVDs, a chalkboard spangled with funny quotes and a library with a whole shelf labeled ‘Pretentious Academic Books’. It’s where we come to watch quality cinema and bad reality TV, to play board games and cards, to knit, and just to hang out.
In the dining room, you’ll find shelves of haphazardly categorized cookbooks, potted plants with names (meet ‘Telemachus’ and ‘Almodovar’), industrial fridges, a terra-cotta pig named Priscilla and our ‘Cool Stuff Board’, with bike maps, listings of upcoming events, photo-booth pictures, etc. Every night, we gather here for dinner – everything from soul food to enchiladas to Indian food to vegan cheesecake. The food we cook collectively is vegetarian (with vegan options), but many of our members do eat meat and buy it with their own money, and there’s no collective shaming or anything. Everyone cooks about once every three weeks for the house. It sounds intimidating, but it’s actually a ton of fun. Plus, for one night of peeling potatoes and hunching over the stove, you get nineteen nights of home-cooked meals, including Saturday brunch.
The house is equipped with wireless internet, a laundry room with eco-friendly detergent, a bike room, attic storage, a maintenance/tool room, and a really sweet bright-green hammock. Our back stairwell is an open art/graffiti space, painted with five babely mermaids, stencils, Wittgenstein quotes and a shark saying ‘Meow?’ We also have limited parking out back and lots of (mostly) easy street parking, and we’re a block away from the 15 bus, which will take you to either the Red or the Green line. The question, of course, is why you would ever want to leave.
Typically, about half of our members are students. As of May 2006, our members included a DJ/fire-poi spinner, a swashbuckling business-school student, a costume designer, a Dutch biochemist, a progressive pastor, a data analyst and part-time zymurgist, a philosophy professor/bike nerd, a queer Jewish journalist, a substitute teacher and grandfather, a guitar-strumming political theorist, a Mandarin-speaking Irish Cubs fan from Montana, a vegan math-mistress, a photojournalist, a Southern feminist art educator, a librarian, a South African Marxist, a viola player, a 3-D animator, an overworked sociologist, a sci-fi writer/illustrator, a milliner and a well-traveled film student/ soundscaper. We recently lost our lone Republican, and we miss him, a lot.
We don’t have a common ideology – just a desire to share experiences and learn from each other. Living here is an exercise in navigating different communication styles, from businesslike and practical to community-oriented and intuitive. We hold all kinds of events, including dance parties, fundraisers, skillshares, creativity nights and fieldtrips. We’ve celebrated Chinese New Year, read Hemingway and drunk whiskey, taken to the streets for Critical Mass, danced all night to electronic music, learned to knit, tried out contact improv, swapped CDs, and celebrated the brilliant Western lesbian romance novel ‘Sisters’ by Lynne Cheney (his wife, not his daughter.) Our members bring their passions and interests to the house, making it an exciting, pluralistic community.
In short – we love this place.
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