schaffer_place


 * Places: Oakwood Community Center**

Located inconveniently at the corner of 10th St. and Route 7, the Oakwood Community Center is in the undercroft of a Presbyterian Church. It is difficult to be in there—for me anyway—without feeling like I am appropriating the space for something other than its intended use. The coffee cups always seem to be intended for church coffee; the old, long tables are meant for pancake suppers. The split-level floor in the main room has some function I’m unaware of, but it feels like a hindrance to me, and any meeting there seems to be leaving some space awkwardly empty. The men’s restroom is two steps up once you walk in its empty doorframe, and it is positioned at the head of the room in such a way that turning around once you walk in gives you the sensation of being in a pulpit. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s some way of using the restroom without an intimidating sensation of attention and performance, but this method is not forthcoming for me.

The side-yard, where Easter egg hunts would have been staged in the church I attended as a kid, has just a little less grass than I imagine it should. It slopes Northwest, toward the compost pile. In the far corner, away from the street but still ten feet from neighbor’s fences, are three piles of organic matter. One pile of branches, one of leaves, and one compost pile pieced together from each, with a bit of pumpkin guts on top visible under some leaves. Short, thin twigs are arranged in support of the down-sloping edge of the pile. I saw the twigs get poked into the ground, otherwise I would not know what sort of motivation the ramshackle array of sticks could possibly have.

This compost pile is relatively untended. I felt like I was doing something wrong when I added the pumpkin guts, like this wasn’t the kind of compost pile I was supposed to add to. I helped build the compost pile, I knew that the plan was to leave it open to all interested parties, and I knew that if I wanted to, I could easily enter and add scraps or turn the pile whenever I felt like it.

But something never came together. The pile wasn’t added to, it wasn’t turned. The biological breakdown that happens naturally to organic matter didn’t happen to this pile. The kind of minimal care that any compost pile needs simply escaped it! Why didn’t anybody care for it? How did everyone involved get the simultaneous sense that it wasn’t theirs to tend? And what is that space between privilege and responsibility (the privilege to dump, the responsibility to tend) that makes interaction with a shared project so confusing?