No one likes moving. Moving companies don't even like moving. I mean, have you ever seen a mover who skipped and smiled his way through a job? Before you think too hard, the answer is no. The only creatures that like moving are migratory fowl, and they only like it because they know better weather and sex lie ahead of them. When humans move it is always coupled with some level of uncertainty or, at best, nervous excitement. For every "better paying job" or "higher quality of life" there are the questions of making new friends or finding the right place. Few if any of us set out on a move without apprehension of some kind, but in most instances that apprehension dwindles once we are settled.
Since leaving my parents' home in 2002, I have lived in a different place seven of the last eight years and the one I place I stayed for two years is the one I most certainly should have abandoned after a year. Any comfort I felt about being settled was quickly turned into anxiety about where I would live next, with whom, and what could I cut out in order to save money. Not only have I personally moved almost annually, but roughly twice a year, thanks in large part to the truck I own, I have moved other friends to and from their apartments and homes to other apartments and homes and sometimes even shanties or lean-tos.
I made a firm decision about a year ago, that I would only offer my moving services to others in the most dire of situations after a friend asked for some help and proceeded to show up late and completely unprepared for the impending rain. It was somewhere between lifting his desk, complete with his snot storage area, and having a tarp tossed to me to cover his belongings while he got inside another car and left, that I told myself I would never do this out of the sheer goodness of my heart ever again. I consider myself a giving a person, but I have to draw a line somewhere. I only wish I had done so before picking up a handful of dried boogers.
While it may have simply been the do-it-yourself gene men in my family have passed down for generations - my 92 year old grandfather just hired a woman to come help him clean his house on Fridays two weeks ago and my father, despite annual tiffs with my mother around the middle of April, continues to do his taxes by himself at the dining room table despite the returns his friends claim to receive thanks to online assistance - I think it was this sharply negative experience that led me to reluctantly ask for help packing for our move from Atlanta and to go it alone on unpacking just a few weeks ago here in Mississippi.
Three other factors contributed to my decision: 1) I am currently unemployed and thus had little better to do, but unload a 1,024 cubic foot trailer by myself, 2) I did not know anyone to call to help even if I needed it, and 3) We moved with PODS. With time on my side, no friends or acquaintances in the three surrounding counties, and a home delivered storage unit, I did what any respectable man would do. I emptied the POD alone.*
Accordingly, there are no photos of this feat, so a verbal description/adaptation must suffice, and for fear of turning this into a romance novel cover, I'll spare the details of my long hair glistening in the sun as I lifted washer upon dryer upon liquor box of books until there were no more though such a description might be more accurate. No, just imagine that lady who rides the eight foot unicycle while kicking a stack of bowls one at at time onto her head at halftime of an NBA game, but instead of bowls it was all our earthly possessions and you should have a pretty good idea of what it was like. Only I wasn't getting paid or wearing sequins though I was entertaining anyone who stopped to watch.
In all honesty, it wasn't that entertaining or fantastic. In fact, some of the time it was really awful. Our house is across the street from a bayou which makes being outside all day a constant fist fight with mosquitoes who are in fact big enough to have fists and use them. Water runs through you like a sieve and any reprieve you feel from the air conditioning when you walk in the door dissipates when you see one of these six-fisted mosquitoes fly into your living room.
But I will offer this analogy: Me : POD :: Joey Chestnut : Hot Dogs. I think if you had given me a Rubik's cube or the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle in the midst of my unpacking, shifting, and relocating, I would have figured them out in minutes. I was on my game. Two seven hour days and it was over. It felt great.
The only thing that made it not so great is that it was stilling an exercise in moving. Moving is a horrible consequence of life, a terrible rite of passage to growing up and making a living. I have mistakenly made it a more regular part of my life in the last decade than I wanted to, and I wish moving upon no one. It's been said that we all have our own hell. For my mom, it's a small, cold room and there's a constant drip of water down her neck. For my mother-in-law, its untangling a never-ending pile of coat hangers.
For me, it is packing and unpacking. There's always something that doesn't fit, something that breaks or gets lost, something that you've loved for a longtime but just need to leave behind. There are boxes and tape and rope everywhere, and you can't do anything else until it's all unloaded because the one thing you need to do something else is at the bottom in the back behind the dresser that's full of the pieces of your home gym that you never use, but keep so it seems like you care about your health. That's got to count for something, right?
Well, by some act of God, the process was this manageable, and I'll be the first to humbly declare how highly I felt about myself upon completion. Does that mean I want to do it again? No. But maybe, just maybe, I'll have a sunnier disposition about it when that day comes.
Will I help you move? Dang, my truck's in the shop and I think I twisted my ankle last night in the shower. Sorry. Maybe another time...
*My definition of alone is myself, a dolly, and my partner's aunt who helped with the last two pieces of furniture. She is awesome and I am not afraid to admit it.
