Occam's Razor

It took many more boxes. Toward the end it took a quick trip to our local Public Storage for a few extra boxes. It took many more boxes and many six packs of packaging tape. It took takeout from the local Silver Diner for breakfast on the day of the move, since our kitchen was all packed up. It took me following behind the moving crew after they emptied a room with a vacuum and/or a broom. It took a large trash bag to toss stuff into. For the moving crew, moving us out of our house took about nine hours, and it involved disassembling lots of furniture, wrapping our furniture in blankets and packing tape and moving awkward pieces of furniture down a harrowing flight of stairs. For my wife it took a trip to a retinal specialist.

There are times when I feel like I married a Calamity Jane. It happens with such regularity that I’ve come to anticipate her medical surprises at the worst possible moment. The other shoe is always ready to drop in my house, so naturally it happened on the night before we were to move four hundred miles. Cooking dinner was not an option the last night in our house, so my wife used the event as an excuse for fast food. On her way back from the Arby’s, her cornea tore, obscuring most of her vision in that eye. So for her moving day was partially spent at a retinal specialist’s office. As emergencies go this one went pretty well. She was seen right away and they did laser surgery on the spot. In two to three weeks she should be back to normal, assuming some other sort of minor emergency doesn’t happen before then.

So it was up to me to supervise the moving crew. Mostly they could be left alone while I fretted over events I could not control. Still, if you have to move yesterday turned out to be the perfect day for it. Temperatures hovered near seventy. Our trees were flowering and spreading petals on our lawn. The sun shown pleasantly through the trees and fluffy cumulus clouds adorned the sky. The doors were flung open while three white guys and a very big moving truck did their thing. Slowly the house that I inhabited for twenty one years emptied. Toward the end we were reduced to sitting in lawn chairs on our deck communicating with our smartphones. (The cable equipment had been returned to Verizon around noon.)

The red stuff went first, by which I mean boxes with red packing tape. They will go into our apartment in Easthampton, Massachusetts so must come off last, thus had to go in first. The rest of it is destined for a storage unit across the Connecticut River in Hadley, Massachusetts. Sometime in July or August when our house is finished, all our possessions will be reunited in Florence, Massachusetts. Eventually all the boxes will be emptied and recycled. My incessant dreams of boxes and packing tape will recede.

For now though we are playing our parts in a well planned time stream. For two nights we are inhabiting a bedroom at my sister’s house in Columbia, Maryland, about an hour away. Sunday morning will find us driving to Massachusetts in separate cars (yes, it’s okay for my wife to drive), and we will begin two nights in a hotel in Holyoke. Monday will find us at our apartment but without furniture. We need to meet the cable guy and get all the internet plumbing working. Tuesday we will meet the movers in Hadley and wait hours while they dump most of our stuff into a storage unit. Then we will follow them to Easthampton and watch them dump the rest into our apartment. We’ll also see our new house which should have a roof on, pick up the key to our mailbox, and discuss electrical connections with the builder.

By the 28th we’ll be back in Northern Virginia one last time. My wife has two doctors’ appointments, one with the retinal specialist. But mainly we will be there to settle on the purchase of our house, which means a few hours more cleaning our now empty house and hopefully meeting our daughter one morning for breakfast as well. On the 30th we’ll make one last trip back to New England, all obligations settled and home for real.

Meanwhile we are literally between states, two wayfarers trying to close one door in our lives while simultaneously opening another.