Do I believe something different can happen?
I started writing this in Chicago a month ago, it’s taken me till now to realise why I’m hesitating to finish it.
Chicago April 12, 2018
I’ve introduced myself at least 30 times this week, it feels like 300. Like everyone, I always start with my name, give them a label for the box they’ll use to file their experience of me. But even before I’ve said my name, as soon as it’s my turn, they look at me and their eyes tell them I’m female, older than most of them. Their expectations start to go into my box based on presumptions. Their ears tell them I’m outsider, even before my second statement, “I’m Australian.” More assumptions flood the box they now know is a foreigner called Wendy.
A Wendy box is relocating to Chicago in search of things that will be “more.” More what? I think about the new things I imagine might go into this box. I wonder would anything change if I put a different name on the outside? What if I spiral out from Wendy like I’m spiralling away from everything I know? What would be the same? Would I be a first impression to me too?
Spirals
Time
DNA branches
Space
bend bars of
a Fence
I’m moving continent. Breathe, I carry the DNA of women who’ve done that before me. Jane, wife of a Master Mariner and her daughter Ella, a teenager who would grow up to be my great-great-grandmother. Relocated from Devon in it’s green cold wetness, the smell of the sea, the bustling harbour town. The high clear air of the moors where Grandma Jane lived with Aunt Elizabeth for years after they’d gone. Those women couldn’t have imagined the dry, dust of Victoria. The heat and emotion of running a pub in the Australian gold-fields. But maybe a retired Master Mariner with his pipe and a redoubtable wife were ideal publicans. I like Jane.
Ella was seventeen when she stepped onto the dock in Victoria. Married at 18 she moved on to New Zealand and a life of sheep and bearing children. A few years later they moved back to Melbourne. Why did they return, forsaking farm and sea to live in a city? Was New Zealand one sea too far? After her Mariner died Jane moved in with Ella. Did they reminisce about English skies? Tell women’s stories of earth and sky and sea and blood? Did their DNA yearn for the green they’d left behind?
Mary Ann, my great-great-great grandmother, wife of a wanderer with his eyes fixed on fortune, she migrated from Gloucester. That husband took their eldest son to the Californian gold rush in 1849, left her in the poorhouse where she trained as a nurse and midwife. I imagine everyone told her she’d seen the last of him! But somehow Mary Ann and the small children, her husband the their eldest, all arrived in Victoria, again following the smell of gold.
Mary’s another who moved her brood around the world. Another of my great-great-great grandmothers Mary was born on the Isle of Skye and mothered 13 children who all survived. But aged 62 and after the death of her husband, with the Scottish potato famine and Clearances underway, she and at least five of her children migrated to Melbourne: did they move or were they forced? There’s a letter from a grandson born in India that suggests she moved voluntarily. My ancestors sure did travel, no wonder why I wander.
My DNA remembers these women, hears them dreaming. My genes carry their senses, memories, strength and commitment. Were they excited? I’m excited. Were they filled with trepidation? I’m flat out scared some days. To move continent, to fundamentally re-shape the life that is your box. What to take? What to leave? What was too precious to these women to leave behind? What, or rather, who did it break their hearts to leave? The touch of whose skin did they mourn? Were they fearful about whether they would know themselves in a new land?
Wendy
Ella
Jane
Mary Ann
Mary
Brisbane 14th May, 2018
I’ve felt lost ever since I came back from my recon trip. I’m back home for 20 weeks to pack and move, sell and release. Who am I? What will I take of me to Chicago? What will I find inside that’s new? What will be left behind? What is too precious, too painful? Why have I drifted inside since I found out I’m definitely going? How is it possible to be so excited and so terrified, so full of organisational plans and yet so in denial as to the cost? The emotional cost. I smiled all the time I was in Chicago but now I’m burying my fears in a flurry or organisational chaos. Sort, sell, pack, don’t think. But, I deserve this, I’ve worked for this. I want it, but it’s so hard. Will I find my gold? Who will I become? Will you know my name when I return?
Wendy's Out of Station 