Got House?

Hi, All, she wrote optimistically. I’m never sure if anyone reads this. Writing is so different from performing. When I sing for people, I may not be sure they like it, but I’m certain they hear it. If you are reading this, I hope you like it.

The big news this week in town is affordable housing, though it hasn’t been small news for many years now.  When I first came here, oh, so many long years ago, housing was pretty easy. At loose ends, I had driven up from Orleans where I’d been visiting friends after spending the winter at Mt. Snow in Vermont. Lots of people from Provincetown went to Mt. Snow in the winter to work back then, and I’d heard a lot about this place, but hadn’t been here since I was about eight, with my father. (Dad used to say to me and my brother, “Let’s go up to Provincetown and see all the weirdos .” Heh, heh. Little did he know he was, at those very moments, growing his own little “weirdos!” Rob and I laughed about that later.)  Anyway, the year was 1968, and it was April on Cape Cod, so I borrowed a car for a drive and wound up here. After prowling around town for a while, I stopped into The Town House, and next thing I knew, I had a job there. I found a great place to live, at the White Horse Inn, on Commercial Street in the east end. The whole apartment was furnished from the dump. Most people call it the “transfer station” now, but then it was “the dump”, and treasures could be found every day. Old stained glass windows and carved shelf brackets, banisters and newel posts, ice cream chairs, the list was endless. Please don’t picture the pristine setting we all enjoy now. There was no Swap Shop, and garbage was mixed with the good stuff, but the good stuff was there for the taking, and once you got it home and washed it off, there was no telling what you might have. Jackson Lambert, a wonderful artist who lived at the White Horse, was an expert dump-picker, and it was he who had decorated the unit I moved into when I first came to town. It must have been affordable, because I know I didn’t have much money and the paychecks from the Town House took a couple of weeks to kick in. To this day, it counts among my favorite places that I have lived in town.

So, I had a pretty soft landing here, back in 1968, but the workers coming here now are not so lucky. Every year I see them arrive with their luggage all taped up, (what’s that about anyway?), trudging from one real estate office to the next, looking for a place to live. Somehow, every year, they seem to get absorbed by the town, and you can find them working as waiters, or at the supermarket, or in retail on Commercial Street. That takes guts. Even at my most impulsive, I never flew halfway around the world with no place to stay. Yikes! Also, the housing crisis is causing an exodus of people who have lived and worked here for many years, or were part of families who have been here for generations. This is very sad. I miss them: Edel, who did beautiful stained glass, and Teddy, so spiritual, so much fun, and so many others who had to leave because they could no longer afford to stay. It makes me feel insecure at a time in my life when I really don’t want to feel insecure. I could be next. You could be next. One tiny change in one’s life can spell the end of living here. Hummm. This is getting depressing. Think I’ll go for a walk on the beach while I can.