Sunrises commune

Sunrises commune is the self-sufficient, ecologically responsible community established by Ash Wenstein and Saffron Wenstein, and it serves as the central setting of Mo Duvall-Wenstein’s childhood and family history. More than a backdrop, it explains Mo’s complicated inheritance: she grows up surrounded by political conviction, improvisational affection, and communal energy, yet leaves with a strong desire for privacy, routine, and a life she can organize herself.

Founding Ideals and Physical Setting

Sunrises is built around Ash and Saffron’s forward-thinking, government-hating veganism and their commitment to living responsibly. The community’s central building is a barely refurbished old barn with literally no walls, an arrangement that makes its ideals materially visible: privacy and conventional domestic boundaries give way to openness, shared space, and an unusually porous household. Ash originally gave the commune its name, but later changed it after people repeatedly abandoned drugged-out teenagers at the gate, mistaking the place for a rehabilitation center.

The commune is therefore both an intentional community and a site of comic misunderstanding. Its residents’ principles are earnest, but the outside world interprets their alternative lifestyle through stereotypes of drugs, instability, and failed social adjustment. That gap between self-definition and public perception recurs in Mo’s account of her upbringing, where her parents’ aspirations toward responsible living coexist with practices that conventional society regards as eccentric or impractical.

Mo’s Childhood Among Constant Arrivals

People drift in and out of Sunrises constantly. Mo loves the laughter, music, and energy they bring into her home, but she learns not to form lasting friendships because children and adults alike often disappear within a few months. Some families cannot make the transition into what Ash and Saffron call responsible living; others leave because their restless natures keep them on the road. The commune thus gives Mo abundant company without dependable continuity, teaching her early that affection can be genuine while belonging remains temporary.

Her parents make the community an exciting place for a child. Ash may suddenly spray-paint the family Volkswagen van an Easter-egg purple, while Saffron takes Mo to a nuclear-energy protest dressed as a radioactive Statue of Liberty. Every day offers a new performance, cause, or experiment. Mo adores her parents’ love, generosity, and attention, especially the feeling of being the center of their world. Sunrises provides emotional abundance even as it lacks the stable structures that Mo later discovers she needs.

Education, Family Strain, and Return

The commune’s looseness becomes less appealing as Mo grows older. She is home-schooled until thirteen, when she realizes that entering public school is necessary if she hopes to attend college. Saffron prepares elaborate lesson plans for the county education officials’ surprise inspections, but her teaching rarely progresses beyond preparation. Whenever a cause demands her attention, fractions and state capitals become secondary, and Mo is left to conduct independent study. Ash’s former career as a CPA supplies enough practical instruction for Mo to learn how to balance a checkbook, but the commune does not provide a consistent academic path.

Mo eventually establishes a separate household, yet family crisis pulls her back. When Ash suffers a massive heart attack, Saffron responds hysterically and Mo takes responsibility for hospital decisions and conversations with the doctors. She moves back to Sunrises while her father recovers, then finds work at a small company outside Jackson and makes an exhausting hour-long drive to check on her parents. The return is an act of care rather than a renewed commitment to communal life: Mo helps sustain the family while preserving the independent home she values.

Food, Ideology, and Domestic Boundaries

Food becomes one of the clearest material expressions of the distance between Sunrises and Mo’s later life. Ash and Saffron raise her without junk food, Western medicine, television, religion, or pets, and their vegan commitments shape the household’s moral vocabulary. Yet the commune’s dietary ideals are treated with comic skepticism when Ash’s heart attack demonstrates that oat bran cannot guarantee cardiac health. The episode exposes the limits of a worldview that turns lifestyle choices into near-total explanations of bodily well-being.

After Mo becomes engaged to Tim Galloway, her parents continue appearing at her doorstep with large dishes of marinated tofu, herbal teas, and THC-soaked reminders of her childhood. Saffron regards Mo’s daily Starbucks lattes as evidence that the relationship is doomed, because anything associated with the Evil Caffeinated Empire is suspect. These visits preserve the commune’s habits inside Mo’s newer domestic life, but they also show why Mo seeks distance: her parents’ generosity arrives together with judgment, intrusion, and an insistence that their values should govern her choices.

Contrast with Mo’s New Community

Sunrises establishes the pattern against which Mo measures Grundy. At the commune, community means open walls, transient residents, political causes, and family life organized around ideology. In Grundy, Mo initially plans an idle and private existence, but work at the Blue Glacier Saloon gives her a different kind of belonging. She enjoys being in the kitchen while remaining separate from the dining room, values the privacy of her work, and gradually responds to the saloon’s friendly voices and chatter as a first small step into town life.

The contrast is not a simple rejection of Sunrises. Mo’s competence with food, her appetite for eccentricity, and her ability to find humor in conflicting beliefs all emerge from that childhood. Her later comfort with wild elk, elaborate baking, and the social meanings attached to shared meals also recalls a life in which food was never merely private nourishment. But Grundy allows her to transform inherited communal skills into chosen relationships and paid work. The commune gives her origins; the Blue Glacier and Grundy give her a community she can enter without surrendering control of her own life.