Your New Life Starts Here

A little window into a future life

It’s not like I haven’t spent years going to the UK. First as a punkette wannabe, then living in London for a year as an art student. Touring, getting together with Eric when he lived near Norwich. Lots more touring, coming and going from France and the US. I guess you could say it’s been a second home.

But I haven’t really taken in the concept of moving there, of being a full-time resident and what it means. How the alien aspect enters in,  when suddenly you’re comparing and contrasting, wondering how and where you fit in.

We haven’t moved yet. Our house in New York went on the market a few days ago and that’s been more traumatic and exciting than I imagined it would be. After months of decluttering, cleaning and painting, I’d lost sight of what all that activity was for: the absolute point of my life was to stand sentry with a Mr. Clean Magic White Eraser and attack the tiniest dot, spot or smudge that any other time would’ve just blended into the background, not worth my time or attention. But once the process starts of cleaning, it’s like Eric and I were both replaced with the shells of our bodies inhabited by a couple of Stepford Wives: must. clean. now. Scrub floor. Wash window. We were tripping over each other to tidy up, except when we’d crawl off to our respective increasingly tiny corners of the house to make whatever brief creative mess we were able to so we could remind ourselves who we are and what the point of all this process was.

So we were in England when the house listing went live – our lovely realtor Shaina came in after I followed Eric over to the UK, took photos, wrote the description – things we would have previously micromanaged but just couldn’t keep control of any more. Time to move on – literally.

I had tried to put thoughts of strangers walking through our house, our home – the story of our lives – out of my mind. Hopefully we’d taken enough personality and personal effects out of the place that people could see their own possibilities. The realtor’s photos looked great, we shared to friends but suddenly another local realtor put it on his popular Instagram account and the strangers’ random comments came rolling in : “C-YUTE!” “Cottagecore vibes…” Love love LOOOOVEEE!” Mostly overwhelmingly positive, with a few callous “Love it – GUT IT.” and “perfect, except for that awful carpet in the downstairs bedroom.” Unexpectedly for a site like this, Eric entered the fray :” I’m the owner and there IS no carpet in the downstairs bedroom” and “Maybe we won’t sell it to you” – it was hilarious and frightening and felt like we were suddenly in the middle of one of the property shows we love.

It’s not too late to get your offers in!

While all the viewing and possible selling goes on back in the US we’re here in England looking at places to live in North Norfolk an area we love while Eric prepares for his book release and 70th birthday gigs next week and I work on making another video for my new album and booking shows for the fall. I was thrilled when our friend Karen asked me to work in her gallery on a Sunday afternoon. I remember coming to the Hudson Valley and seeing another friend named Karen (Schoemer) serving customers at a funny combination bookstore/bar in Hudson and how working there brought me so much joy and connection to the place, even though I’d never tended bar or had a job in a bookstore before. It just felt like “why not?” So here I’m going in to work in an art gallery in a seaside area full of visitors and daytrippers and country folk and posh people and I think “sounds fun!”

But as Eric drives me over to open up the place on the gorgeous sunny first Sunday of May— BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND proclaim all the local pubs and restaurants— I start to feel nervous. What do I know about bank holidays? I’m a foreigner. They’ll know—they’ll know I just dropped in from somewhere else.

Yes I’ve played many many gigs in the UK, but that’s coming in as an artist, an entertainer, not trying to pass myself off as one who belongs. What will I do if they ask something and I can’t help them? If they hear my accent and think “she’s not from around here”…or “who let her in?” or perhaps the harshest of all “what – is she Canadian?”

(Nothing against Canadians! It’s just that feeling of insecurity that you don’t even represent the home team well enough to be identifiable – although usually along with the Canadian remark comes the qualifier “Cause you’re so nice and soft-spoken.” This might also be the place to acknowledge my privilege as a white woman of a certain age, while the UK starts its incomprehensible scheme of deporting illegal asylum seekers to Rwanda)

Beneath a windswept sky, fields and spring blossoms above low stone walls roll by, I think of Straw Dogs, I think of Wicker Man. I don’t know these people, this ancient island, except for my husband and family and friends and some people who like my music here they don’t know me. I only have a passing knowledge of their ways. I picture the gallery filling up with local folk wanting me to help them while I sweat, running back and forth trying to calm the crowd. I’ve tried all my old bar tricks, played Roger Miller King Of The Road, soundtrack from Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, Curtis Mayfield Move On Up— then realize what felt so comforting back home only serves to highlight my other status. I shift gears: Shirley Bassey, Tricky, Nick Drake. It’s too late. They’re taking the art off the walls, the murmuring grows louder:

We need art! Kill her, kill her – Must have art – kill her now!

I shut my eyes and clap my hands over my ears, it all swirls around me: “For Sale” signs and moving boxes, guitars stacked up in cases, Mom’s old Fiestaware on a shelf at the thrift store in Hudson New York; my daughter’s hiking boots and HeeHaw donkey…the gas-powered lawn mower and aluminum boat we’ll leave behind…fish & chips and “cask ale” signs and people wearing shorts on a fifty degree day; friends welcoming us, friends waving goodbye.

Coming to, the gallery is empty, all the art safely back on the walls. I hear Paul Simon, Train In The Distance, an old playlist resurfacing. People stroll by the gallery, stop in and greet me pleasantly. I decide I need to adapt, put on the gentle, subtly disquieting songs of Robert Wyatt.

This moving thing is going to be a process, a journey. No one wants to kill me. I can make it work here.

“Lovely weather,” says a nice lady who enters the gallery with a small dog under her arm. “Beautiful day,” I say back. A way in! I can talk about the weather with the best of them! I start to say more, about the glorious clouds in the sky and isn’t the green absolutely perfect but I restrain myself. Don’t want to try too hard. 

I backpedal on the music though. I love England and Robert Wyatt, but there’s no situation Roger Miller won’t improve.

Another Sunday in a different land