Being Home
Being home has been the most unexpected gift. After living on the road for a dozen years, here’s what I’m learning.
On March 12, 2020, our suitcases were open on our dresser, ready to pack for South by Southwest. The van had gas in it. Twelve different one-way tickets had been purchased to get our bandmates to Austin from New York and Providence and Portland, OR. Homestays had been arranged. Gigs had been booked in cafes and clubs and barbecue joints around Austin. But then the COVID-19 numbers started rising. South by Southwest was canceled. The April tour was canceled. Then the May tour, the June tour, and one by one the summer tours fell like dominoes.
Along with the disappointment of lost opportunities, however, I was feeling secretly pleased, excited, eager for the chance to just stop for a while. (like Brer Rabbit from the story -- oh no, don’t make me stay at home! Anything but that!)
Home has always been a temporary stopover for us. A place to spend a few days unpacking and repacking, unwrapping mail, stripping beds that Airbnb guests slept in, vacuuming, remaking beds, emptying the fridge. And then on the morning we leave on tour, we eat two mushrooms, three eggs and some cream cheese on stale rice cakes for breakfast because everything must go.
I never had my favorite blankets on the beds lest a guest use them for something unsavory. The two attic rooms were covered in beds for guests instead of being spaces of our own. Now we’ve begun to nest. The attic is alive. It has my writing nook and sewing corner, space for my unrolled yoga mat, a mini-recording studio, David’s writing desk, and a backdrop for our live streams.
Home is safe, private and it’s not on wheels. It doesn’t move thousands of miles in a month’s time. It doesn’t smell like five guys, two kids and a road nanny. The meals are made by us from our garden, not from Thai Garden 99. And instead of hotel beds each night, we have garden beds in our front yard. Cucumbers, kale, collards, chard, beets, beans, squashes, nasturtiums, spinach, okra, strawberries and carrots. I could go on but I’ll spare you. But only after I mention the trellis, an archway dripping with butternut squashes and swelling watermelons, once the size of a marble, now as big as a peach, marking the growth with the sizes of fruit like we did with our children in utero. The garden is alive. It is growth and motion, stillness, full of orange polka dot harlequin beetles and white cabbage butterflies and each night a handful of fireflies. Did I mention the bees? There are no bees on tour, hovering among purple towers of salvia.
For me, the stillness of being at home after a dozen years on the road feels like explosive disruption. Privacy is a thrill. The release is the feeling my brain gets when I realize there are no more shows. We don’t have to put on a face. Even though it’s a face I love. It’s defined and positive. It’s all smiles and tears and harmonic intervals I find without thinking. But privacy! Wow. No audience at all. It’s soft. It’s slow. It’s boring. It’s lingering in a rascally toddler’s bed until 9pm until he lets you go rather than the quick kiss goodnight before jumping on stage.
I realized I’ve been living in community – a commune the size of a 15-passenger van – for the last 12 years. Hundreds and hundreds of towns and motels, flights and shows. It feels like the only privacy I’ve had for the last decade was in the bathroom, if there even was a ladies room in the basement green room, which there almost never was. But it was a place alone, even if only for five minutes, to hear the dripping pipe, see the broken hanger where the toilet paper should have been, the nearly unrecognizable paper towel dispenser, tattooed and stickered, long empty. The tiled soap dispenser that I break in order to stick my finger up the smooth hole and retrieve the last gasp of cleanliness. This was my privacy, folks.
But now, now! The richness I feel in this small kingdom of ours is profound. There’s room to run out back. There’s a clothesline with fluttering flags of faded red shirts and miniature undies. There are wiffle balls to hit, compost to be made, orange and purple earthworms to dig up in the spring. A nest of fluffy birds is tucked in the dogwood -- three babies with flexible toothpick necks awaiting the worm delivery. Library books full of gorgeous paintings of fairytale boats with gardens on deck.
The fantasy of it all astounds me in a similar way the fantasy of packing a family into a van and cruising down highways to play music each day astounds me. Kids sleeping on hotel floors, green room carpets, old friends’ parents’ futons, the promoter’s guest room, a stranger’s attic. The constant movement was normalized. Of course it was, after so many years, like anything done repetitively until it is not seen or felt as new anymore. Newness was not new because everything was new each day. New town. New foods. New bed. New soap. Newness became routine.
But home! Home is new each day with each change in mood, and sky and season. There are new eggplant bugs to squish on soft eggplant leaves. New leftovers to eat each day. I suppose this newness might also fade and the thrill of the road will tempt me once again. But for now I am reveling in this time and the unexpectedness of it. And I’m thankful for it, as spring becomes summer, becomes fall, becomes whatever. And I flip another calendar page to see the wide open space with no tours in sight.
