Relative Comfort

The Tolsons didn't set out to create a family compound on their suburban street in Columbia. It just happened.

THE LETHBRIDGES TRANSFORMED A FAMILY FARM IN BURTONSVILLE into a sprawling enclave with 11 houses and 31 family members.

Three women in the Simmonds-Hamilton clan shared the same house for nearly 40 years before moving into adjoining townhouses in a 55-and-older community in Laurel.

Gerry and Diane Tolson raised five children who initially sought their fortunes far from their Columbia home. Now three of them own houses on the same block as their mom and dad.

These folks live in different versions of family compounds, bastions of kinship and intergenerational support. Although this phenomenon isn't tracked in census data or home builders' studies, it isn't as rare as you might think. Even in a place as transient as the Washington area, the desire to remain close to kin leads to novel arrangements in unlikely places, as the families profiled below demonstrate.

The Simmonds-Hamilton Clan

ARIA SIMMONDS, ONE DAY SHY OF HER SECOND BIRTHDAY, gallops into her grandmother Margaret's kitchen in Laurel ahead of her dad and her brother, Colin, who's a bit under the weather.

Great-aunts Sonia and Audrey and cousin Marie are here, too, ready to smother the children with affection and tease them with an array of nicknames. Because of her dimples, Aria is Mrs. Wimples. Her 3-year-old brother is Collie-Wollie. And their 44-year-old father, Dean, is -- well, he'd rather not say.

On Thursday nights, Dean brings Aria and Colin by for a bite to eat between day care and bedtime; dinners on the weekends are more leisurely, but no less lively. As the children await a favorite meal of turkey meatballs and rice, their grandmother and aunties make funny faces and play Let's Pretend, just as they did 40 years ago with Dean.

Margaret's son Dean Simmonds, an account manager at Sprint's corporate office, settled in the Washington area in 1981 when he was studying engineering at Howard University. Now the household he grew up in has followed him south from New York, with one adjustment. When he was a child, everyone lived together in one big house divided into four apartments. Now his mother and aunts live in adjoining "villas" on the same block of the 55-and-older community of Central Parke at Victoria Falls.

"It's the same as when I grew up," says Dean, who lives nearby and visits often on the weekends. "Instead of all the visiting being vertical, going up and down stairs, you go down the street. Everybody rotates during the summer for lunch or dinner or tea. In the old house, sometimes you'd be having dinner on Mom's side or on my grandmother's side."

He remembers listening to reggae in one kitchen and to Roberta Flack, Gladys Knight and Leontyne Price in others. Along with a wide musical appreciation, he acquired a rich culture that stretches back to the family's origins in Jamaica. And he learned that the children come first.

As Sonia Simmonds sweeps up Aria for a kiss, the little girl cheerfully practices her latest expression: "Don't bother me!"

"Ah, so that's the new phrase, is it, Arie-Parie?" Sonia purses her lips playfully. "Are you going to the naughty bench, Mrs. Wimples? Say, 'No, Ona, I'm going to be a good girl.'"