What is Community? Most people answer this question by immediately recalling a geographical location...a place where they once lived. However, as I have come to understand over the years through experiences and listening to others, the full concept of community is much bigger, with consequences far beyond the place where we first experience the touch of others in our lives. It is really the "touch" that defines community in every age. When I was a child, the "touch" looked like shared conversation after a hard day of work in the fields. It was sharing meager meals as if they were banquets. It was my great aunt and I gathering in the wood and coal to create a warm home and stave off the winter's cold. The "touch" looked like math problems being explained and lunch money given. It looked like long walks together to Lake Washington where fishing was mandatory. It looked like my great-aunt standing on her narrow front porch each morning for four years alerting the bus driver that I was indeed going to school that day. It looked like Miss Sarah Fields pulling out her orange crate box to make an extra place at her supper table. In the place I remember, we valued each other and shared our lives.

Of course, when I am asked "What is Community," I, too, recall a place. But I realize now that the place was just the set, the stage where my great-aunt and others could share the past of their lives, the present we knew, and anticipate our future together. In other words, the real community I knew as a child was not held captive by geography, nor was it defined by the physical stuff that was part of our place. Recalling my place, I remember the big iron bed, the sixty-watt exposed light bulb, my cot, the old washstand, the shift-ro that held up the wall and the windows that looked out on roads that I thought led to nowhere. Recalling your place, you will also recall things, like your house, your room, the furniture, your office, your desk, the basketball court, the park and the paintings on the wall. Yet when asked to make the community personal, you will no doubt place people at the center. The memories of ordinary acts of kindness formed from relationships are what I cherish, unselfish acts with people at the center.

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