After my announcement at the Austin show that I would be retiring from live performance, I came home feeling like an odd bird. Recently Roman and I had been forced to vacate our home for several months while a nasty mold issue was being addressed. An aspect of that was the requirement of finding a new home for the chickens. Now everything was rebuilt and restored except the chickens. We had grown less enamored with chickens. Roman asked if I would consider selling the house while it was so showable. I thought it would be okay to check with a real estate agent.

I got a call from Cryptic telling me that they had booked The Residents for a festival so I needed to find my performer replacement or plan to fly to Europe. I didn’t want to fly to Europe. Cryptic arranged a temporary Airbnb in San Francisco to have a place to work while I did pitches to my potential musicians. The Airbnb was in a flat owned by an older married couple. Their home had two bedrooms which had belonged to their now grown children. They rented them to strangers because, like me, they no longer had chickens. I say “older couple.” I am certainly older than they are, but they had that aura about them. They reeked of being “adults” and I treated them respectfully as distant Aunts and Uncles.

The other room contained a British tourist. He was in his twenties and charming. My “Aunt and Uncle” seemed to think their child had come home. They kept saying he looked like somebody and I thought quietly to myself that the person he looked like was Jeffrey Dahmer. Seriously he did. But I had a mission and couldn’t stick around for dinner.

My first appointment was with one of my favorite people. He was a busy producer and I didn’t expect him to be available to replace me but he would have workable suggestions. As it turned out he did have time this summer for rehearsals and a quick run to Europe. I had my replacement and it was quite a score. He would have been my first choice.

Throughout Residents history, members of the public who paid lesser attention to the music world often confused our little group with the band, The Replacements. And now we were one step closer to being them, at least in action if not in name.

I called Roman to tell him. He had his own report. Selling our land would be easy. A big tobacco company was wanting to buy farmland in the area. They would remove the structures to open the land for a state of the art marijuana farm. It made sense. California was on the verge of legalizing recreational usage and who better than tobacco companies to utilize their infrastructure to market the stuff. I crinkled up my nose at the idea. That was not my fantasy. Perhaps even worse they would clear the forest all the way to the river. I wondered what would happen to the big blue heron who lived there.

I stood in the shallow water on one foot. My other leg bent under my body. I was waiting, as I always do for a fish to swim too close. I blinked slowly and caught a glimpse of Roman on the shore. He gently watched me though I knew he only saw my blue feathers, not his lover. I wished I could waddle over and sit silently next to him on the rocky beach. I knew then. While I could leave the stage, I could not leave the river. I could not leave Roman nor the fish that swims too close.