Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This

On choosing what you already have

It was seven years ago this month that I moved here, to the little town with its gaping mouth, which swallowed me up and never let me out again. You could say it was a fateful accident, the way Jonah encountered the whale and was saved from the moonless churn of the ocean. Moving here was the mooring I didn’t know I needed.

Fourteen miles north of the old whaling town of Hudson NY, Chatham is a village of just 4,000 people. It has a Main Street that looks like Stars Hollow, with a white gazebo and a ring-road and brick storefronts that sing at golden hour. I came here with my bandmates in May 2017 because we wanted to make a record somewhere green and quiet, within driving distance of the city. We searched the whole area for the right summer sublet. It wasn’t easy to find a spot whose owners were willing to rent to a group of ragtag musicians, but we finally found one—a little chalet on a pond at the end of a rundown road, tucked back behind the Columbia County fairgrounds—and it was perfect. We moved in when the lilacs were flowering and spent the summer tracking what would become the album Lavender.

On Labor Day weekend, the county fair drew thousands of people to the lot behind our house. Ferris Wheels and funiculars went up over night. For days, the smell of funnel cakes and cigarettes hovered over everything. We finished recording Lavender to the sound of monster trucks and megaphones announcing the prize-winning zucchini and pig.

When the fair packed up and summer ended, it was time to pack up our sublet too. But we didn’t know where else to go after that. Not back to Brooklyn, where we’d already said goodbye to Eastern Parkway and Sherita and $5 General Tso’s tofu. We decided—in a way that felt less like deciding and more like sliding, conveyed by a current we didn’t care to fight—to stay in Chatham. We found another place to rent, this one with an indefinite lease, on the other side of town.

The years kept going, ticking by like the freight trains that trundled through our yard. The seasons swallowed us: nettle, goldenrod, woodsmoke, snow. We got married. We sheltered in place. We made more records, ate more fried dough. Eventually, the landlord sold us this house, and we brought our baby home, here, from the hospital, and one summer snowballed into seven good years.

7 is a number synonymous with change. There’s the 7 Year Itch, which some people say is the point in a relationship when things begin to decline and you get antsy and ready for a change. Perhaps that comes from the idea (science or myth?) that our cells regenerate every 7 years, effectively rendering us a new body—a change we can’t see but maybe, on some deep micro level, we can feel.

But I don’t feel the change now. As I celebrate my 7 year anniversary in this sweet and somewhat random town, I don’t feel any itch. I feel the opposite of it. Like my whole life has been an itch, and each year here has brought a bit more relief.

I love the grumpy cat in the window of the wine store. I love the house on our street that puts up decorations for every minor holiday. I love the Peace People who stand by the gazebo every Saturday with signs that say honk for peace! I honk and drive on, past the video store that we’re convinced is a front for something else, the rows of VHS’s in the window faded blue and white from the sun. Past the guy who works at the co-op and walks around town with a staff, always wearing a neon green t-shirt no matter the weather, his thick orange hair sticking out from a Davy Crockett hat. Past the park where you have to step around goose shit on the pond’s sandy beach.

I didn’t choose this place so much as it was chosen for me. But I choose it now. I am doubling down. Call it the 7 Year Settle.

Sometimes the best things, I’ve found, are the things you already have. The obvious yet somehow unexpected. Those moments when the world comes into focus and you see that what you wanted was right in front of you the whole time. The way that Z was my bandmate for years before I had any idea I was in love with him. The way we rented this house for years before we had any idea we wanted to stay. When I’m feeling restless, I will remember this. That sometimes it’s just as simple as unfuzzing your eyes. That sometimes the act of choosing something, even if it’s been there all along, is novel enough. That re-committing is its own kind of regeneration.

The other day, I was walking to goose-shit park when a little boy, seven or eight years old, biked up to me and started talking as if we were mid-sentence.

“You know that song that goes traveled the world and the seven seas…” he said with a slight lisp. His freckles made the Pleiades on his cheeks. I remembered this feeling: being a kid on my bike around the neighborhood, wheels spitting up rocks on the warm pavement, the whole world opened up to me. I could go anywhere on that bike, but I kept circling back home.

And then the boy and I sang “Sweet Dreams” together while he biked wide arcs around me, our voices echoing into the still-bright evening.