After long thought which began last spring, we decided to move to Denton, where Dean has worked for years, leaving College Girl and a couple of her friends in change of the Fort Worth homestead. We consulted rent rates, driving distances, insurance rates, school choices, and even shopping and grocery stores. It looks like it will work.

Making the decision and renting the Denton house was relatively easy. But after a week or so of packing, last Wednesday dawned: moving day. After almost five years, there was a lot of stuff in the family home, even after we gave a number of useful but unwanted items away using Freecycle. (Best moment? Seeing an excited seven year old boy pick up a shoebox full of old Pokemon cards.)

Despite engaging two young men to help – friends of Pia’s – by noon on moving day an atmosphere of despair prevailed. We had loaded what seemed like 100 book boxes before 10 a.m.  I had found a lot of small change under various pieces of furniture but it was nowhere near enough to compensate me for the feeling of malease – no, panic – that I was having at relocating, and at the slow process of getting stuff out of the house. There was still all the furniture and appliances, we were finding stuff we’d forgotten to pack, the mercury had hit about 110 and that was not adjusted for the factor you use if you are doing heavy lifting outside.  People’s shirts wore a wet shield of perspiration over the chest and a whole-back sweat slick. And then there was this: fraying tempers. People were not getting along. One of the young guys had a family emergency and had to leave. 

Just as I was beginning to envision what happens when your move crashes and burns, if you just don’t have the wherewithal, the sine qua non, of moving ability to actually get yourself OUT of your prior residence, fortune smiled.

First, people stopped carping at each other and just kept carrying stuff. “Just do not make eye contact,” I told my eldest son, 16, who had been at the center of one dispute. By two in the afternoon, things were looking a little better. Furniture fills up the truck faster than boxes and is lighter.  At three o’clock I told them I was leaving to go up to the rental office and get the keys to the new place. They loaded up the Explorer with electronics (the no-AC Suburban was needed for additional stuff carrying) and I left.

A small emergency between the rental office and the new house (not knowing where my ATM card was, seeing that the “fuel emergency” light was on and then having to buy $2.50 in gas with the quarters, nickels and dimes I found under the furniture) kept things exciting for me while I waited for the truck in Denton. We got into the new house and it looked good, carpets cleaned, freshly painted.  “But what will it look like once our junk is in here?” I worried, then put aside my doubts. Perhaps I could get some nicer used furniture from Craigslist once the heat of paying all the moving deposits and fees and repairs on the old house was up.

The family-crew and the moving truck arrived at about 6. “We got everything big in!” they told me, and I brushed aside the fact that “everything big” meant there was still enough little stuff to keep us busy with cars and SUVS for a couple days remaining at the old house.  Amazingly, some neighbors on a church service project showed up and helped us unload. Unloading is always easier than packing up, and in just over an hour, all the furniture (in pieces) and boxes (mostly labeled at least as to which room) were off the truck. 

Wow, was that it for the moving van? It appeared that it was. I got a pizza at the local shopping center and we ate it. I couldn’t believe we made it. One day, all the big stuff.  We live in Denton, in the middle of an anonymous subdivision flanked by beautiful pasturelands filled with cattle and horses. The new house is wonderfully laid out, new, in perfect repair. It’s paradise, really. Moving, on the other hand, is always going to be hell.