MOVING
Moving On
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
MOVING
by Adam Carroll Draper
We did it. Stef and I sold our house and moved out.
After nearly a year and a half of fixing and digging and nailing and blood and pain, selling the house (pronounced “Aaaaagh!”), finding a new place and moving (not necessarily in that order, or any order, or anything remotely resembling order… or even a vague notion of time and space), I have one suggestion to those who may be contemplating a similar rendezvous with destiny.
“Run, Forest, run!”
For the love of everything sacred and your last, faint grip upon a sliver of sanity, don’t do it unless you must.
Not everyone would have seen or done this my way, which was to assume that it must not be all that big a deal (since people to do it all the time) and leap – the free fall of which took over a year. Fortunately, Stef is more sensible than I am, but we were both bound and determined to do this thing, this endeavor. Sheryl Crow and Coldplay sang differently the same lament, “No one said it would be easy, but no one said it would be this hard.” We knew the songs, but not the painful application of their sentiment.
Ours was not a normal move. Those who know me do not associate that appellation with me – normal. I first moved into the old house in 1979, when my parents bought it. I was a rising sophomore (which means, he who thinks he knows everything) at Bishop McGuinness (particularly the Guinness part) Memorial High School. It was on Link Road in Winston Salem at the time, and didn’t even have a football team then, dang it! My dad put me to work digging up and installing a new French drain. I just did that again (with a huge amount of help and a backhoe) this summer. I lived there on and off with my parents through undergrad and law school. Much to their silent horror (I am sure), I moved in with them at age 29, when I started my own practice. Dad tolerated that a for a bit and then said something like, “Junior, we are moving. You can buy the place from us or get out.” He said it nicer than that, but my way is funnier.
So, yeah, I have lived (on and off) in the house Stef and I just sold for FORTY (40) freaking years! When we started getting it ready to sell, it had the “funk of forty thousand years” (you’ve got to say that like Vincent Price in Thriller). To my very good fortune, my parents left most of their furniture for me when they moved. They also left a lot of our families’ stuff. This is the amassed history of a family of seven (the inhabitants were down to my mom and dad and me when we moved in, but we still had pictures and 45 records and… stuff). My daughter, Jordan, grew up in that house. In particular, she and invading hoards, partying like Genghis Khan, graced those halls through her college years. “From the window to the walls, till the sweat…”! You know.
The dictates of candor require that I own up to the ravages of my extremely extended Dionysian youth on the house, but I will leave it at that. The residue of that life was strewn about in boxes and paper and… stuff.
Stef and I got married six years ago. The house also had all of her… stuff. Her mom saw the chance and promptly enriched us with the stored contents of Stefanie’s youth as well. That house was full of stuff, and I mean that in much the same way you might express displeasure with someone in Spanish, “te cagaste” (you’re full of… [stuff])! From the attic to the basement, spilling across the garage and even out in a shed, there piled… stuff.
Think about this for a second.
My wonderful, patient, kind, sweet and exhausted wife has spent the last year and a half ridding us of stuff. “Oh no, not my old football helmet from middle school!” I am afraid that she will bear the emotions of this experience for longer than I will bear the scars of her percussive cajoling. Stef is much too fine a person to literally assault me, but there were overwhelmed moments in which all the flotsam and jetsam of Isengard would have seemed a sublime spotlessness in comparison to the ancient sprawl of stuff in our house. I am sure we were close to some sort of encounter with clarity several times. The plaintive warning of my father’s tutelage reverberated within and guided me on such occasions, “Are you tired of living?”
I love my wife!
We are not rid of all the stuff. It is strewn about the new abode as I write. Stef continues to conspire as to how to sell, dump, remove and relieve us of precious monuments of life’s journey. We moved!
Thanks to everyone who helped us sing this song. “We’re leavin’ Babylon, y’all. We’re going to the Fatherland. Exodus, movement of Jah people!”
If you got anything out of this missive, please give it a thumbs up, comment and/or share it. It helps. I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to read it.