Round the Bay: It Took Six Days

for 2 crews of professional moving men to pack up and empty our house. We’d lived there 22 years. Four kids, three dogs, lots

of wonderful memories...

Movies often begin with a moving truck leaving or arriving, a universal symbol for change... stress. The tearful kids saying good-bye to their friends… exhausted parents who've taken a new job in another town or state, possibly having lost their previous job. Or the house. Maybe they’ve split. Maybe the family has said goodbye to a pet—oh no! Will Precious Pet will get lost along the way?

Moving rarely makes us think of happy times.

In our case, I was happy. Newfoundland! A Canadian island in the Atlantic! Newfoundland! With real winter lost to me years ago when we moved to Texas from Illinois, pre-dogs, pre-kids. Newfoundland! Just me, My Hero and our dogs. An adventure! Does Newfoundland have a song or do they just sing O Canada? Note to self: learn all the words.

Believe me, the move didn’t happen quickly. It was more like unpeeling an onion, layer by layer. Stinky at times. Lots of sniffling. I had plenty of time to learn the rest of the words to Canada's national anthem but never did. There were days and weeks and months of wondering when the move, if the move would happen. Unexciting stuff and some really exciting but not-about-the-move stuff too.

Fast forward through the first 3.5 items on our 12 Step Home Improvement Plan: Reside the garage, paint the exterior of the house, tile the kitchen, recarpet the rest of the house. We never got to carpeting the second floor, thus, the .5.

Our second grandson was born five weeks early in Austin, TX. (He is wonderful and healthy.) Our youngest daughter married Her Hero in Southlake, TX. I volunteered to create centerpieces for the reception. Loved it. Had a blast. We took a house hunting trip to St. John’s in November (potential future blog post,) enjoyed a last Thanksgiving in the house with all our kids and a quiet last Christmas and battened down the hatches.

Phil (My Hero) flew to St. John’s right after New Year’s, experienced Newfoundland’s island-wide power outage in a hotel and started his new job. I was alone with the dogs, but time flew. The Houston area’s unusually cold winter weather was surely prep for St. John’s. I dined with friends, met writing pals for coffee, and practiced wearing a winter coat. I prepared for The Invasion of the Moving Men and gave up trying to write my current novel. I barely kept up with my editing. I brainstormed in my head, not on paper or computer. I woke up before sunrise, went to bed early at night. I sorted things I wanted to keep together in plastic storage boxes. You can’t expect movers to know what stuff should be packed with what other stuff. Better safe than sorry. Seriously, it was like sorting my life. I took a lot of pictures, threw a lot of stuff away. I divided the kitchen in half, posting green (“move”) or hot pink (“store”) sticky notes on the cabinet doors behind which I’d rearranged the contents. I forgot just how much I love sticky notes. In retrospect, I think we’ll forget all about most of the things we’ve put in storage and wish we’d just said adios to more of it forever.

Packing for storage took three days. The packers were strong good-hearted gentlemen who listened to my instructions (my fault, what they didn’t pack in those huge wooden crates.) They braved super-cold (Houston) weather and icy roads. Every school district in the Houston area was closed one day but I insisted the guys could get to my house safely by noon. I was right. I tipped them generously for their trouble.

On the last day, when the truck full of huge wooden crates containing our stuff drove away, I prayed the next crew, the moving packers, would be just as good. Someday I might blog about the Most Awful Move EVER. Midland. June, 1988.Talk about a nightmare.

Day Four, a Sunday, which I found unusual, the big orange Allied truck drove up. To say The Driver is a “character” is an understatement. What job has this man not had? He claims driving for Allied has saved his marriage. I would love to meet his wife, no doubt a character too. A resident of Toronto, he drives to St. John’s all the time and wasn’t the least bit concerned about the weather or roads. (Since Newfoundland is an island, there is a very long, overnight ferry ride involved.)

The crew of packers our driver hired was terrific. To say that they were a bunch of “characters” is also an understatement. Packing up is not supposed to be fun, but not only did they do a great job, I was highly entertained. Instead of tipping them daily, I bought them lunch and delivered it. At the end of their third/last day—our sixth day!—we gave each guy a big tip. And I "was given" an unlikely mentor for the main character in my Novel in Progress.

Then they hopped in their cars, honked their horns and followed the truck down the street.