Thursday, February 28, 2008

Why Do People Hate Moving?

Call me weird, but I love moving. I find moving exciting. You get to stop living in one place and start living in another. You get to put all your stuff in a new space, and decide where it’s all going to go and how it’s all going to look. You get to go through your things and get rid of stuff that you never really used anyway. You get to wake up in a new bedroom, learn how the sun streams in across the walls, and walk along a new route to the kitchen sink for a morning glass of water. And then when you get into the new place, inevitably you need/want new furniture and get to go shopping. (I window shopped for a new couch last weekend and found a very nice couch. And for the small price of $7,000 it could be ours. Ha!)

I even like helping friends move. It’s fun to spend the day with all our friends helping the ones that are moving get their stuff into their new place. When you’re moving with a group of friends, you spend the day working together on getting all the boxes and all the furniture from one place to another. You end up joking around, secretly making fun of your friend’s stuff when they can’t hear you. You get fed pizza and beer, and at the end when the U-Haul is empty you inevitably have the first party in a friend’s new place. Overall, I find moves to be a lot of fun. Sure, moving all the stuff is exhausting, but it’s good exercise and it goes by quickly when you’re goofing off in the process.

There was one time when we helped a friend move when it wasn’t any fun at all. Just a few weeks before Todd and I got married some friends of ours were divorcing. We helped him move out of the place he shared with his wife. We rallied around our friend and helped him get his stuff out of the place and into the new one. It was a tense day because our friend was very sad at the prospect of his marriage ending. We were all very sad at the prospect of his marriage ending too. We silently formed a line of people from the door to the moving van, and we handed our friend’s boxes and belongings down the line, not really knowing what to say that would provide him with any comfort. We couldn’t exactly make fun of his stuff and crack jokes. We couldn’t exactly express excitement over his new apartment where he would unwillingly resume his bachelor life either.

We arrived at our friend’s new place, and began to haul his things up the winding staircase to the second floor. We couldn’t get the couches up the tight stairway, and took the landlord’s suggestion of bringing it through the window on the second floor. We backed the moving van to the side of the house, and used an elaborate pulley system that my MacGuyer-esque husband brought to haul the couch onto the roof of the van.

We tried stuffing the couch through the window and it wouldn’t fit.

We removed the window frame and tried to finagle it through the gaping hole in the side of the house to no avail.

Now what?

Our friend called his ex-wife to ask her if she wanted this couch, and she said no. We shoved the couch off the roof, and watched it fall to the ground. The wooden frame under the leather and the padding crumbled as the couch it the ground. With a dull thud the sofa collapsed into a pile of leather and cushions on the lawn. At the moment the couch hit the ground, the tension in the air dissipated. We stood on the roof of the moving van and doubled over with laughter. This was the first time we laughed all day long. We held our bellies, we wiped the tears off our cheeks, and we hooted and hollered over the broken couch. At the end of the day we left our friend with his boxes and his broken couch, trying to keep the tension in the air broken along with the sofa pieces on the grass.

Two years later we moved him into a new apartment with his girlfriend, another good friend of ours. We once again formed the line from the apartment door to the truck, and we passed our friends’ belongings to each other and filled the truck—laughing, joking, drinking beer and once again hopeful for our friend’s adventure in a new home with his new partner, and their new life together.

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2 Comments:

Blogger ME said...

The move itself can be exciting but I hate the packing and unpacking. Ugh.

February 29, 2008 at 2:56 PM  
Blogger *~*Cece*~* said...

I've only ever moved twice. I don't know if I want to do it again anytime soon b/c this time I've got 3 extra bodies to move AND a WHOLE house full of STUFF! lol

February 29, 2008 at 6:45 PM  

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