Starting Again

I’m in the thrift store, aka charity shop today, looking for bits and pieces to add to my bare apartment. My real belongings are safely locked up in my storage bin, 3,218 miles away. I need things like a place to put my toothbrush so it can stand up and air dry. A small container into which I can put my variety of herbal teas that I have brought over 3000 miles because they are easily crushed into my suitcase. And what if there isn’t Sleepytime tea in the UK? How will I ever sleep again without my nightly infusion of chamomile, spearmint and lemongrass? Besides, after three months in a storage bin, the tea may go bad and then what?

I buy a round red container to hold my tea and match my curtains, a faux crystal vase to hold my toothbrush, and because I’ve finished Woodston, by John Stemple-Lewis, I buy a used book. Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson, published when he returned to the US after twenty years in the UK.

The first essay in the book is about buying spackle in America, but Byrson only knows the British name for spackle, which is more than I do. Three days ago, I had gone into the local hardware store on the corner. I’m not even sure it’s called a hardware store, but anything that has hooks, bike tires, mops and drying racks as well as car batteries, extendable curtain rods, and boxes of screws is a hardware store in my mind. Smith & Low, on their website, refer to to it as ‘Aladdin’s Cave‘. And it is full of treasures.

“I need some stuff to fill holes in the wall of an apartment I’m renting,” I say to the man behind the counter. “In the US we call in spackle. I don’t know what it’s called here. And the flat tool you use, the spackle knife as well.”

He leads me over to the variety of what I will find out is called “polyfilla” and the assortment of putty knives.

Bryson’s book was published in 1998, 25 years ago, and I feel as if I am reversing his travails. Learning to speak British after an entire life living in America. I buy my polyfilla and my spackle knife, and I go home and fill holes in the wall of my flat. This small act of buying the spackle to fill the holes left by the previous tenant somehow makes it feel more like home. That, and my new friend at the hardware store.