Another moving experience

  • Finally made it from there to here, from Kansas City, MO to Phoenix, AZ.

    So what have we learned?

     

    White Ele­phants on Parade

    Well, for one thing, it doesn’t mat­ter how much you pre­pare for it — when you have to shift all your worldly goods worth shift­ing, it’s just appalling to notice how much of it seems dumb, point­less and unnec­es­sar­ily bulky. It’s even worse to notice that those areas of your house where you throw stuff that you just don’t want to deal with actu­ally weren’t worm­holes into deep space. So those crafts that you haven’t fin­ished and that swank-looking kitchen gad­get some­one gave you (which you never use) and and all the stuff you sort of meant to sell on ebay some­day … that crap is STILL THERE!

    It’s like some­thing out of a hor­ror movie. You cheer­fully pack up a box of all the impor­tant things from a room of your house, and then you gamely pack up a cou­ple more of things that don’t seem THAT impor­tant. And then you open That Closet or That Cab­i­net and there it is — six more boxes’ worth of stuff that is almost (but not quite) rubbish.

    I may be one of the only peo­ple left who refer to these “goods” (there’s really noth­ing good about them) as white ele­phants. The term used to refer to a rare beast in India, but it also came to stand for all the large things in your life that are pur­ported to be trea­sures, but actu­ally become worse than worth­less, because you can’t stand to just throw them out. So what I’m say­ing is, if you have to move, beware the White Ele­phants’ Grave­yards. The nasty beasts come to life like zom­bies and tram­ple your enthu­si­asm!
     

    Boxes Don’t Hold as Much as You Think They Do

    Even given the pre­pon­der­ance of white ele­phants, I could NOT fig­ure out how it was that we could be fill­ing dozens and dozens of boxes when I had dri­ven car­loads of things to Good­will and deliv­ered bags and bags more to the trash. It was rather depress­ing on the front end of the move and even more depress­ing when those boxes all rema­te­ri­al­ized in the new place.

    (Can I take a brief moment here to say that I know peo­ple who have a hor­ror of hir­ing any mov­ing peo­ple — even friends — to trust with their belong­ings, because they’re cer­tain that the lar­ce­nous nogood­niks will make off with some of it. Unhap­pily for us, we have never man­aged to find these sorts of mov­ing men. Ours always deliver every last, blasted box and bin of our crap to us and glee­fully leave us suf­fo­cat­ing in the midst of it all. I call this an appallingly bad work ethic.)

    It really wasn’t until I dived in that I noticed that there is a phys­i­cal law going on. To wit –>The boxes don’t hold as much as you think they will. <— When you’re putting stuff in, you end up hav­ing to buy three times as many boxes as you thought. When you’re unload­ing, you’re sur­prised to find that the boxes empty out quickly and form an impres­sive edi­fice in your bath­tub. So why is that? Is it because there aren’t really that many things in your life that are per­fectly rec­tan­gu­lar and box-shaped? Even if you’re a good jigsaw-puzzle-fitter like I am, you end up with lots of air­space in an aver­age box. The huge relief is that cart­ing Mis­souri air to Ari­zona didn’t require me to find an addi­tional closet to store it in. So I pass this the­ory on in the hopes that it may lower some­one else’s blood pres­sure as it did mine.
     

    Watch Out for Mars and Venus Collisions

    Greg and I have done four cross-town moves and three cross-state moves, so I thought I was ready for the bat­tles over what does and doesn’t con­sti­tute a Pre­cious Object. But men and women just tend to see these things dif­fer­ently, and I con­sider it a vic­tory that we only had a cou­ple touchy “dis­cus­sions” this time.

    Greg is like my dad — and like most men, I think — in that he con­sid­ers it an out­rage that any­one has to do the actual work of putting our things into boxes. Some­how, our things should all be spir­ited from point A to point B, where­upon they should take up res­i­dence out of sight but eter­nally near at hand. There should be no human inter­ven­tion required, and there should be more than enough space for every last object to go into some good place because … well, because that’s how an ordered uni­verse works.

    It doesn’t give me as much grief as it used to that I can’t pull off this stunt, because I even­tu­ally noticed that it was just nuts. And so, when we move, I try to unob­tru­sively remove things that have no earthly use for us and donate, sell or trash them.

    This is where the argu­ments hap­pen. I should have noticed that to men, things acquire a qual­ity of “pre­cious­ness” that may be in direct con­tra­dic­tion to their out­ward use­ful­ness. The “good” shirt is the one that is so thread­bare that Good­will wouldn’t even take it. The “price­less” object is the thing that was got­ten over every­one else’s objec­tions and has been held onto in spite of all efforts to remove it.

    If it sounds like I con­sider this to be an inscrutable phe­nom­e­non, I sup­pose that’s cor­rect. It would be a valu­able insight for me to know how to nav­i­gate this ter­ri­tory, and assess­ing it accord­ing to my female sen­si­bil­i­ties isn’t much help. Since it falls to me to run the house, I grow increas­ingly unsen­ti­men­tal with the years. Maybe it’s because I’m dis­or­ga­nized, but I err on the side of a steely insis­tence that every object be able to account for itself. There are cer­tainly dec­o­ra­tive things and memory-makers and quirky objects aplenty in our house (more on that in a future post), but if your habi­tat is so chock-a-block with them that you can’t tell where one ends and another begins, it’s time to get tough and toss some out.

    And I don’t think Greg and I are very unusual in this. Fore­warned is fore­armed. Wom­en­folk, men­folk: Pre­pare to argue over silly things. As always, just try not to say any­thing that you can’t take back. We all know that the worst argu­ments some­times hap­pen over the dumb­est things.

     

    All Part of Life’s Rich Pageant. No, Really.

    But in spite of all the both­er­a­tion and stress and weari­ness of mov­ing, I don’t think that the words on the U-Haul trucks are entirely ironic. It’s true; mov­ing is a big adven­ture. Maybe it’s the gypsy in me, or maybe I’m just inca­pable of not see­ing some good in things that take that much energy, but for all the headaches, there’s some­thing kind of excit­ing about it all. We man­age to thin out some white ele­phants every time we move, which feels like it light­ens the load. Yes, Greg and I get grumpy over the deport­ment of var­i­ous things, but in the end, we under­stand each other bet­ter. We get to see new places, meet new peo­ple, try out our act in front of strangers and see what hap­pens. Trav­el­ing about may seem unat­trac­tive to some — and  down­right immoral to oth­ers — but there’s no deny­ing that it does broaden your hori­zons. We’ve never lived in a desert this seri­ous before, or a city this large. I’ll get busy and talk about how that’s going shortly, but it has cer­tainly been an adventure.

    And I tend to like those, even when they come with zom­bie elephants.


    Related posts:

    1. Greg & Grace on the road … again
    2. Apol­o­giz­ing into the ether
    3. Stealth cat on tape
    4. Life as it should be
    5. Fol­low the bounc­ing cockatoo

    October 14th, 2011 | Grace | 6 Comments | Tags: , ,

6 Responses and Counting...

  • Word­mama 10.14.2011

    Nicely encap­su­lated! Pic­tures of ele­phants being crammed into boxes made me laugh out loud. From my expe­ri­ence, the stuff goes back down to a work­able level once you get rid of all the boxes and pack­ing mate­ri­als on the other end. But of course, my last move was from a medium-sized space into a medium-and-a-half-sized space, so there were more places to put stuff.

  • pho­tini

    While mov­ing 19 times in 30 years the motto was always, “Three moves are as good as a fire.” I don’t think I ever under­stood that until my hus­band retired from the Army. We’ve been in the same house now for 9 years. It is amaz­ing how much can accu­mu­late if you aren’t hav­ing to sort through it to move every year or two.….

  • greg­w­brooks

    For the record: I have excel­lent, excel­lent taste in Pre­cious Objects™ and have no idea why this lovely woman is try­ing to throw all our worldly goods away. :)

  • Grace

    I will stip­u­late for the record that Greg has excel­lent taste. And I’m not just say­ing that because he called me a “lovely woman,” although I’m sure that has a lot to do with it.

  • Grace

    I love the expres­sion that three moves are as good as a fire. I didn’t bother to go into it in this post, but I was an Army brat, and so that kind of mov­ing around is also part of my his­tory. I think you’ve got me beat, though. We moved eight times from my first to 17th year, and then my dad retired. I haven’t added up how many moves my mom went through, but any­way … we def­i­nitely under­stand each other on the sub­ject of cut­ting ballast.

  • Grace

    Yep, going from big­ger to smaller was pretty appalling. I think that after all the pain of shed­ding unwanted ton­nage, I can begin hav­ing an eas­ier time of man­ag­ing things in a smaller place. But if I’m wrong about that, we can all look for a rant-filled future post.

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