She's About a Mover

I’m talking to my brother Michael on speakerphone as I drive back up the NY State Thruway after dropping Eric off at Newark. I tell him a little bit about our house closing today and yesterday: the heat (peak temp with our U-Haul van parked in the sun was 103), the 1-800-GOT-JUNK pickup, “no umm, not those guitars there, just that umm, trash over there;” my disorientation. How I just thought “wouldn’t it be nice to stop at Adams, my favorite grocery store in Kingston, and pick up some healthy good stuff to make dinner”—I pictured myself in the kitchen throwing together a meal as I’ve done thousands of times in that spot—and then poof, it’s like the kitchen disintegrated —we don’t live there anymore.

There’s no plate, no spoon, no cutting board. Nothing remains except the colors we chose and the cabinets Eric built. The induction stove we sweated and struggled to put into place last year when our old Sears gas stove, bought off Craigslist for $50 in 2011, finally gave up the ghost. The large refrigerator we gave in and bought after trying to make do with a dorm fridge “the way they do it in Europe” for a year. The plywood countertops remain but something of the people we were and the stuff we used for almost thirteen years in that place are gone.

Friends say I must be emotional saying goodbye, but the sheer physical toll of moving—packing, lifting, shoving, loading boxes and furniture into a van and onto dolly after dolly and into a storage space where it awaits being reloaded into a shipping container…flinging old wood and metal and all kinds of trash from the back of a van into a bay at the local dump; climbing up and down and up and down onto the back and side of a van and two flights of stairs in the house—we’re not as young as we were and my main impression of moving is one of debilitation. I was fifty-two when we moved here from France, and I’m sixty-five now. A whole other reality. Yeah, yeah, age is just a number. Bullshit. We’ve lived through our parents declining and dying, our kids growing and thriving (yay); grandchildren, a Trump presidency, Covid; so much bad news; the threat of another Trump presidency. Family and friends passing away—last week Scott Cornish and Mary Sack; Jeremy Tepper inexplicably gone a few days ago. Songs written, countless posts, albums made, books written; gigs played, merch slung. I don’t want age to be just a number, I want all the experiences we’ve been through to add up to something.

But they take a toll, they really do. We try to take care of ourselves but the machines show wear and tear. So things like heat and lack of sleep and stress take a bigger toll.

Why aren’t you just hiring movers? people ask. “Now those guitars go into that smaller storage space along with these boxes of merch but make sure those other guitars go into the bigger storage space along with these boxes of archives but please make sure the tape archive goes into the smaller storage space because we don’t want those shipped…” I imagine there are super-organized people who are up at four AM every morning at a treadmill desk typing out a manifest of all their assets for someone to tag and sort for another person to funnel into the proper channels so it all ends up in just the right spot but…I don’t know those kind of people!

Friends helped. Probably couldn’t have done it without our drummer neighbor Sam, our family next door Kelly and Antonio and their little girl Lucy. I tried imagining Lucy grown up and remembering these wacky people next door with all the guitars and it breaks my heart a little. I think of my own daughter living here with us in aprt of the pandemic era, how this was her home too. It’s all too big, too hard thinking about the end of our era here and the practicalities have been so pressing.

I mean, there are so many things about clearing a house I never thought of and modern life just makes them harder than ever. For example, did you know you can’t just dump paint cans that still have paint in them in New York state? The paint must be hardened. Or you can take a total of five one-gallon containers at a time to a collection point, like a paint or hardware store. When you’ve just repainted your entire house there tends to be a lot more than that left over.

But it turns out kitty litter hardens paint! So I’m opening can after can and pouring the cheapest litter I could find at Walmart in to absorb the wet stuff. Holding the cans up to the light “Gosh do you think it’s dry enough to bring to the dump? I have no choice, it needs to be gone, now—I’ve got to risk it!” Only to roll up to the local transfer station and see everyone else has gone ahead and dumped truckloads of paint cans with impunity.

Then there was the large propane tank we’ve had next to the house since we moved in. I remember trying to find out which oil company had placed it there—none of them wanted to touch it if it wasn’t theirs. We gave up and worked with the old oil drum that stood nearby instead. The house has been on town gas for several years now, the oil drum is gone but the big propane tank remained. I tried calling the companies again: “Ma’am it is illegal for us to take that tank if we can’t verify it’s ours.” The buyers of the house wanted it gone.

I asked at the dump, leaving a message for a guy named Mike, to see if they’d take it. He was really nice, calling me back to tell me they could only take 20-gallon tanks. This one was more 120 gallons. He suggested a local scrap yard, IF the tank was empty of all propane.

Finally I listed it on Freecycle. I’d heard it was a good site, but in the rural part of New York you find listings along the lines of “Wanted: empty Evian bottle, for art project” or “Available, pair of women’s sports socks.” I took a chance anyway. We were starting to think we’d have to haul the tank to a lonely spot in the country and dump it, but I worried that I’d made us traceable by leaving a phone number for Mike at the dump, and we might get some government agents showing up at the door and hauling us in as criminals.

There was a response to my post! They said they were interested. I mentioned that my husband would help me haul it to the curb, just to keep anyone from getting the wrong idea…I mean who knows what “propane tank” might be code for?

At 8 a.m. two days before we had to move out, I crept out into the yard just in time to see a young guy strapping the four-and-a-half-foot tank onto the back of a flat bed truck. I gave him a big double thumbs up, then worried I’d looked too enthusiastic, indicating there was something wrong with the tank maybe and he might change his mind. Eric and I peeked out the window until he’d safely driven off and I think I did a little victory dance, that we’d finally dumped that damned tank after over a dozen years.

Maybe that’s part of what’s so exhausting about moving: you’re confronted with all your failings in quick succession and it takes a toll. Hundreds of copies of me and Eric’s 2012 album A Working Museum, that we thought was a big success, emerged from the depths of a closet. Instruments that never got repaired, artwork never sent, clothes that no longer fit. The death of possibilities that could live forever in suspended animation—yes, these ice skates fit me perfectly…sure I bought them ten years ago and haven’t actually used them but—I love to skate! And I hope and plan to again. The tennis racket I bought to replace my old wooden racket after watching Borg vs McEnroe on a plane—I LOVE tennis, and it’s such good exercise.

I had to acknowledge that I’ll likely only skate once or twice more in my life. The skates were unwieldy and had to go. The racket—well it’s flat! And the weather in England is much more conducive to hitting some balls. The racket stayed. The dream lives.

So many clothes went. I half expect to walk by our local thrift store, who’ve taken boxes and boxes of stuff, and see a display in the window, like a diorama devoted to me and Eric and all our old junk: a male mannequin sporting a leather car coat, black corduroy bellbottoms. They could use a backdrop of all the paintings Eric made for our Homemade Aeroplane house concerts, paintings we can’t bring ourselves to throw away. My mannequin could be holding a Diary Of A Mod Housewife tea towel in one hand and hoisting a pint glass in the other for all the hours spent pouring beer at The Spotty Dog. I picture Eric’s dummy with a life vest and oars slung over his shoulder, wearing a pair of headphones. Mine has purple suede shoes and that red leather jacket I used to wear. I hope people will remember us.

So I’m talking to my brother and I realize I’ve automatically turned off the Thruway at the Saugerties exit. I’m in freefall, sense memory sending me to a home that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m staying at our friends’ place in Hudson, next exit on the Thruway but there’s nothing else for me to do but drive as if I’m going back to our place. Would anyone notice if I crept around to the backyard and sat out at the picnic table where I’ve spent so many hours? Where I’ve written and talked on the phone and laughed and drunk wine and cried? I bet nobody would even know I was there.

Nope, I haven’t got time to be emotional. No time for that at all.

Amy Rigby is a songwriter, musician, and performer. Her memoir, Girl to City, was called “…the best rock memoir I read all year” by NPR’s Ken Tucker. The New York Times wrote" she's right up there with Paul Simon and Randy Newman" as a songwriter. Her new album is ".Hang In There With Me" is out August 30 on Tapete Records, pre-order CD, LP or download here. She lives with her husband and sometime duet partner Wreckless Eric in England these days but she'll be touring the U.S. in the fall (see below).

She's About A Mover ::: The Sir Douglas Quintet

Moving Day :::: Charlie Poole & His North Carolina Ramblers

Reverend Gary Davis ::: You Got to Move

Bobby Womack ::: I Am a Midnight Mover

The Everly Brothers ::: Gone, Gone, Gone

Bob Dylan ::: Going, going, gone

Robbie Robertson ::: He Don't Live Here No More

Amy Rigby ::: Dylan in Dubuque