J. Christina Smith:  

ouble what I am getting in Iowa City., Prairie Hill is the only cohousing community in Iowa. I visited in October/November 2021, after meeting some community members who were vacationing in Maine over the summer. I loved the people and the location. I do in fact have Iowa connections: my mother was a graduate of the University of Iowa and she grew up in Waterloo, where I still have an uncle and three cousins.. The community has about 8 acres, a common house, a fenced in community garden, and when my building (the last one) is completed next year, 37 households. It is multigenerational. I'll be living with people who like me, have spent time living in Japan, as well as people with Danish-American connections I can practice my fractured Danish on. Of course, retiring, selling my three-family house (a fixer upper). and moving 1200 miles is a lot of change. Activities over the past 30+ years in Boston have included volunteering on Thompson Island in Boston Harbor as a tour guide, volunteering with Boston Area Gleaners, and sharing my space with feline companions. Since 2008 I have been studying Danish, which is the second language of Greenland and the first language of some of my maternal ancestors. In 2014 I visited Denmark for the first time and visited some of the places where my great grandparents had lived. I enjoy cooking and baking, reading, and walking. I worked for seven years as an archaeologist for a consulting firm in San Diego but was laid off during the Reagan era and decided there was "no future in the past." I next taught ESL to SE Asian refugee adults in Stockton, California, then went to library school, graduating from San Jose State University in Dec. 1987. My first library job was at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and it gave me a home base for weekend trips to Bryce and Zion national parks. After fifteen months there I came here to Boston (after a 21 year absence).