THE SUN VILLAGES
No. 22
Helga Roe Conklin | San Diego, United States
Photo by Henry Do of the Danish suburb of Brøndby Garden City in Brondby
The dawn of the days following the Pandemic began with wanting something better for our parents than the nursing homes of yesterday.
The first new residence was made up of ten tiny houses retrofitted with ramps and other amenities to make life easier on aging bodies, set up on rural land in the mountains of Northern California. Each tiny home had a small garden for the residents to tend to, if they wanted. The homes radiated out from a large central ten-sided building, a kitchen/community room surrounded by a giant food garden, with pathways like the rays of the sun leading to each individual home. Nurses were hired when necessary, though it became less common as health care was approached from a multifaceted view. Food came from the garden and other locally sourced farms, healthy and tasty. Movement happened naturally through gardening and the off-grid maintenance, as well as opportunity for things like yoga and tai chi classes. The arts were often witnessed taking place here and there on the land as it became clear that creativity was healing for the mind. Theatrical types often led several shows to entertain their neighbors and a few comedians in residence kept everyone laughing.
Still, death came, as expected. It was treated as an honored moment of remembering and celebrating. Death happened in their own bed with loved ones nearby, often setting up camp on the property for several days so as to be close. This was a much-earned ending to life in their bodies, an honor not all survived long enough to see. Those who had died too young, sons and daughters to wars or drugs or car accidents or disease, were talked about in these moments as part of the journey the elder had survived. Death was not feared, for why fear the inevitable setting of the sun? Instead, their passing was sung, guiding them to the great beyond.
Voices raised up in song were often heard in those times, in both joy and sorrow. So were stories of the time before the economic collapse, stories of hope for the future that had finally arrived.
Their joyous energy infectious, grandchildren were urged to visit often, and that was where the greatest social change truly began... Adult children, having come to visit their parents felt so good on their extended visits with their families that they stayed, and the rays of the sun village grew to hold all the generations, and it came to pass that little Sun Villages sprang up across the country.
Now, many years after the Pandemic of 2020, the villages include all kinds of people, and resemble a cross between the Native American tribes from pre-colonial times and the gypsy caravans of old Europe. In this new way of being in community no one is lonely anymore and no one is forgotten, the sunrise of a new era.