I came to LeisureLand through my parents;

I was ?an accident,? but a happy one, in 1990. My parents quickly moved to a rural area, but then returned to the city of Eugene shortly after my brother was born in 1994. When I was seven my parents ended their marriage, but not their friendship. She moved to a rural edge of Eugene with a friend-turned-romantic-partner and formed an intentional community with three more friends, while my dad went back to school for a degree in journalism, and eventually struck up a successful relationship with my best friends’ nanny.

My dad was worried about the effects of Y2K, and my mom found a piece of property that was the perfect bolt-hole in case of civil unrest and/or lack of electricity and services, which my dad bought with money from his grandfather meant for my brother and I to attend collage with, with the intent of the community of SlugRanch taking care of it, and paying back the college fund by the time I turned 18. They moved to what would be called LeisureLand.

The intentional community came apart quickly and Mom and Randy were the only ones left, with the rent now far beyond their current incomes, while the house demanded constant repairs to slow the decay the previous owners had nurtured. My dad’s personal control over the finances allowed them a few years of missing payments while they learned that Autism was affecting my mom, that Randy could play drums to her bass/guitar, and that a friend of Randy’s could teach him enough about construction and remodeling that he could become a private contractor. Then Mike moved to the land, and it became LeisureLand, and Brandon moved in and then I. As of 2009 we have paid off all the interest on the property accumulated during those searching years.

For nine years after the divorce I lived in Eugene with my dad and his new partner, and visited Mom on weekends and holidays, when I felt like it. I loved the land, and the people there, but had other things to do, being a kid and all. I went to Eugene Waldorf School for kindergarten through eighth grade, and then on to South Eugene High. I enjoyed Waldorf even as I chaffed at the rules and ideals, but South was overwhelming and meaningless, chock full of college prep classes and sports teams. I experienced one heartbreak, and was at the end of my tether when I evolved enough to strike up a conversation with Brandon, one year old of living at LeisureLand, and a friend-turned-family of five. He was 21 to my 16 years of age.

This conversation led us to converse more, and fall in love. I moved the next month, to LeisureLand. I went to school at Mapleton High, much more comical and manageable of a school, if still a meaningless drag. I didn’t go back for 11th grade, having decided to take my GED tests at Lane Community College instead. I did, and easily passed them, realizing I could have taken them the day out of eighth grade and passed and feeling doubly glad to be out of high school.

My morning view.

Us at our wedding.

That summer Brandon and I went backpacking and hitchhiking up and down the Oregon coast for two months, and conceived of a plan to revive the garden that some SlugRanchers had revived from the previous owners of the property seven years before. We did, with the enthusiastic help of all of LeisureLand including Mike’s son Bill, and my brother Zane. We were married a week before my 18th birthday in front of our family in the heart of the property that is our home, and the ceremony involved some soil from the garden.

The garden and the home are good analogies for life, and as we pondered them we came to the idea that we wanted to explore the idea of community through experimentation and communication, starting with our family of five-to-twenty and moving on into an online community of everyone. And here I am. As for the future… I now am planning on going to college relatively soon, (soon to hyper link that line to the page that talks about that) and LeisureLandCommunity.org is being created with my help, so we’ll see where the adventure takes us next!