Moving. Even typing the word upsets my stomach. We are currently looking at the back side of moving my mother from the home that she and my father were in for twenty years before he died, into an apartment
I’m still having moving nightmares.
There are only a few things I hate more than moving, either myself or others. Going to the dentist and potty training…right up there. Friends don’t let friends drive drunk and don’t ask friends to help them move. However, when it is the person who gave you life, while you still don’t want to help, you kinda have to.
It happens in stages. First comes the tape; green for “keep” blue for “ditch” was our code. For a few months my mother had to live in her house with all of her possessions swiped with blue or green. Not pretty- but it works, if you can agree to what gets moved and what gets left. I found that when you are at your house it becomes difficult to imagine the true constraints downsizing will actually pose. Why not take all of the chairs in the living room? The piano can be tucked into a corner and Dad did make that table after all. So, reluctantly, I unroll more green tape than blue.
We spent time at the empty new apartment, the key word being “empty.” Empty things look enormous. We got out Paul’s favorite metal tape measure and crinkled it back and forth along the walls envisioning where things would go. We stood, hands on hips, and visualized the ginormous space filled with my mother’s furniture and it seemed perfectly reasonable to bring all ten thousand lamps.
And so, it seems, we did.
On the day of moving we broke into teams; Paul and I went directly to the apartment to welcome the moving guys in their first flight, my mother and sister stayed at the house to direct the traffic of the actual moving process. We opened the first door to smiling faces of the movers, arms laden with colorful totes, tops bulging with newspaper-wrapped-everythings. Smiles turned into looks of determination, mouths straightened, brows beaded with sweat as the number of door openings began to tally up. The pristine look of an empty apartment quickly cracked as muddy boots crossed the new flooring and piles of totes begin to create a listing tower in the kitchen.
Now, as much fun as the move-out is, the move-in is even more. I am in charge of unwrapping packages that are not Christmas presents. Glassware is clothed in colorful newsprint and my hands quickly become blackened with ink making everything I touch in this pristine space smudged with my fingerprints; clear evidence if I break something. My mother has arrived and cannot seem to stand still long enough to devote attention to any one room. I work in the kitchen hollering questions to her about the what and where’s while my sister stands precariously on milk crates hanging curtains. Paul has decided that he will go out into the quiet hallway to put together the entertainment center which arrived in the coffin-size box. He doesn’t fool me and I eyeball him with my now newsprint smudged face. The look is one of envy rather than anger as he shuts out the chaos behind him.
I continue bending over and pulling gifts from totes. It becomes apparent that my mother has moved two hundred bowls. I begin stacking them in cupboards and quickly realize that, if I continue, the kitchen will become a serious monument to the cereal bowl. I hold up a variety of them; some clear glass, “salads,” she tosses over her disappearing shoulder, solid white? “soup” from the bathroom. Well what about the same size in red, my voice sounding a bit strangled. She leans around the corner, looks me in the face for a long time as if I have asked her the most stupid question possible, sighs, exasperated, and says “cereal.” I ask her why she can’t use one of the same size salad bowls for soup as well and she turns her back and walks off. I wipe my hands on my pants, thinking why not cover everything with black so it matches, and peruse the scene. It becomes crystal-bowl-clear to me that my mother can live to one hundred and never use the same bowl or lamp twice.
I look over at my sister who is now steaming curtains while gazing longingly out the window, and we shrug simultaneously as she uses the universal “cut’ sign across her throat and mouths to me that something has to go.
It is later, post wine, that I have some clarity. My mother is eighty-six and has lived with many of these things her entire adult life. We brought all of her wedding china and silver, knowing full well that the card table in the living room will not be seating full service. She knows it too, but can’t face it. The most common sentence from her when I would ask (okay, whine), “But mom, it is just you, how many bowls of cereal can you eat at one time?” was “Well, what am I going to do with them?” This phrase answered similar questions about bath towels, cooking pots, silverware and cans of button mushrooms.
It was her life, not things in front of her, and she was taking comfort in the familiar. We all could see my father drinking coffee out of his “Best Bumpa” mug, now resting quietly in the top corner of her cabinet. But, why oh why would she need that huge electric fry pan for one person? Because skillets on the stove top splatter. Of course.
I knew that my real job was to quietly tuck some of these things into bags for the ReSource. It wasn’t that she would even want or miss them, she just didn’t want to be the one who said they had to go. My role was to become the moving hit-woman.
It all made me think about how much “stuff’ we accumulate and how much we actually need to live. You can make tuna salad with a fork and bowl rather than a food processor after all. I have always felt grateful for living in small space, it helps making purchasing prohibitive. Perhaps it also alerts us not to equate things with people. That Bumpa-mug is a mug, it is not my father. My mother’s wedding china represents a memory rather than her actual marriage. We should be able to let “things” go and hang onto what is real and important and, I can’t believe I am saying this but maybe moving or changing is instrumental and perhaps even necessary to put that theory into practice.