Stories About Moving

After two weeks of packing, a long day with a moving truck and a few friends, three days off to unpack, we have now been at our new place for more than a week and you can finally walk from room to room without having to do any special contortions to get around something that is going to go somewhere else. We've even had a friend over for homemade pizza.  Not that there isn't more to arrange, discover, move around, share.  In a few days I will have a postcard to show you and maybe some photos of out lovely little place.  For now though I wanted to share five favorite moving moments I thought of while packing our place up and shifting it a few miles down the road.

1.  In 2001, leaving Savannah for Seattle, I was trying to clean up the last of our things at 2 am and I threw away $500 in cash.  The mistake was realized in the morning.  M's persistence led to a 30 minute search of all the garbage cans as the car was otherwise ready to go, stuffed to the roof with bikes, a table, and Andrea, who was catching a ride to Philadelphia via my mom's house.  M found the money, and, despite the anxious car, we walked down the street and got sandwiches before leaving.  I apologized but I also stubbornly held the belief that one who gets paid in cash shouldn't leave it in an unmarked envelope in a room full of unmarked envelopes.  Of course, one who throws away $500 shouldn't make excuses either.

2. 2012 leaving New Orleans for Oakland: Andy drove to one of the only grocery stores with ice for cold beer to offer friends as we packed a moving truck 2 days after a hurricane, while most of the city didn't have electricity.  He arrived back at his place to find me drinking elderberry vodka and water and packing and brought me ice cream despite the lack of refrigerator to store it.  Luckily, Eric showed up soon after and ate the rest of it before it melted. 

3.The one time I was ready on moving day, 1997, leaving Allston, MA, splitting my belongings between a youth hostel in the Back Bay of Boston, where I was an overnight front desk clerk.  I was lucky enough to have a room with only one roommate and we had separtate bedrooms and our oun "kitchen" : a hotplate and a toaster over.  But we were in the basement and surrounded by alcoholics.  Perhaps knowing this might not be a good move, half of my stuff was going into storage at my dad's place in New Hampshire to be retrieved 4 months later when the city and moreso the hostel living, depressed me too much so I loved to the New Hampshire seacoast.  Which was also depressing.  But when my friends arrived in the morning to help me move out of myAllston apartment, everything was boxed, labeled and I already had iced coffee.

4. New Year's Eve, 2010, Baton Rouge. The first of 4 days of moving as a freaskish cold snap hit the south and we didn't know how to turn ont the heat.  We figured out the stove, ate pasta, got dressed in shiny things, rode half across town to a party, got drunk, told Andy it wan't raining, rode home. It was raining.  Woke up cold, damp, hung over, on the floor of our new place (the bed frame was still at the old place). Still, it was a good place. Did I mention it was the time we moved to Lover;s Lane? Really.

5. July 4th 1996, Derry NH. A few weeks earliter, I moved out of my first apartment with a sleepover. Had requested teh elecetricity to be shut off that day but forgot that might mean 2 am so we could't watch the end of the zombie movie or vacum the industrial carpets.  I stayed with my dad for 3 weeks then was offered a bunk bed at a friend's apartment.   I drove a car full of my stuff, probably mostly summer clothes and books and my typewriter over to his place and moved in. His parents lived 30 miles away and let us stay there for free. The downstairs was haunted by a ghost or a demon and so we had to take out laundry to the laundromat in town. 

Ok, enough reminiscing for now.  It is late for me and I might have to get some sleep so I can fold and send 150 postcards tomorrow.

It's Not Your Fault

Oh Prague, it snowed upon my arrival. I walked under the astronomical clock wondering why didn't I go to the beach like everyone else for Spring Break. But I didn't. I walked and walked, got overcharged by the mystery man at the lunch place, under-impressed a stranger, found the cozier bar for reading but then reunited with two men from my plane which lead to too much Becherovka, and for my last night, a party in my hostel as I slept.

All that, and the greyness aside, the skies cleared one afternoon. It was warm enough to explore and I discovered side streets and public art. A giant heart made of candle wax that looks like a wall you can enter from the side. I sat in cafes and drew pretty chandeliers and ate cake. I found the park that seemed to follow the sun, and ate dinner at the same wonderful vegetarian place two nights in a row.

If only my trip wasn't bookended with grey. But grey days are a good excuse to stay inside a museum, like the Museum of Communism, which, among other things featured a 30 minute video about the student protests from 1969-89, during the invasion of the Soviet Union and later, the fall of communism. My hostel was on the same square where the tanks rolled in, where a student burned himself in protest, where the police beat the crap out of peaceful protestors, where night after night thousands of people gathered calling for the resignation of their government. But that didn't stop the party where I stayed.