So this week's Friday Five asks about your experience of the marvels and madness of moving...1. How many times have you moved? When was the last time?
As indicated by the title, I don't move. We moved into our home on January 16 of 1984. It was 16 degrees below 0 and the interior of the house was about 50 when we finished. I was newly pregnant with twins (although I didn't know about the twins part), and at the end of the day I crawled into bed and waited to die, barely emerging for the next few months except to puke.
Or maybe I do move. Every week I drive back to seminary and stay at the dorm for three to five nights. It occurred to me the other day that I have lived something of an odd life. I moved into a dorm in a Catholic boarding school when I was twelve (~ yes, go ahead and think Hayley Mills in Trouble with Angels and you would be right on target ~) and here I am, doing it again.
2. What do you love and hate about moving?
I hate the packing up every week, and I'm sure I would hate it more for a real move. The organizational skills required are beyond me.
If we were to make a real move, I would love the opportunity for real change. Different spaces, different colors, different furniture, a different neighborhood. Twenty-four years is a long time.
3. Do you do it yourself or hire movers?
We woud have to either hire movers or set a fire to the place.
4. Advice for surviving and thriving during a move?
Just don't do it?
Seriously, I have no idea. Around here, people don't much move, except for those who want a smaller place (we are now in that category) or those obsessed with re-habbing ( we are definitely not in that category, although opportunities abound). Most of my friends and aquaintances have been here as long or longer than we have. But I have a number of friends in my online moms group who have moved several times, and they bring such positive attitudes and energy to what seems to me to be an insurmounatbke task that I am in awe of them. They also seem to share a remarkable capacity for remaining unattached to inanimate objects, like rooms or yards or entire houses.
5. Are you in the middle of any inner moves, if not outer ones?
Well, duh.
Bonus: Share a piece of music/poetry/film/book that expresses something about what moving means to you.
Hmmmm. . . maybe Carole King's So Far Away. I'm sure that part of my resistance to moving comes from my ability to return in the blink of an eye to the lost and sad feelings of the summer of 1971, when I had just graduated from Boarding School Number 2. Boarding school is a strange life ~ the 24/7 companionship of adolescents living almost entirely in a world of their own forging ~ and the break when it ends is profound and devastating. In a pre-email, pre-Facebook world, I think most of us were at something of a loss that summer, and I know that we all listened to Tapestry and Blue until the grooves wore out.
9 comments:
I can appreciate the Carole King, and I'm giggling about setting fire to the place.
Carole King definitely got me through those long lonely winters separated from my camp "family". We have 3 sets of neighbors, on both sides and 1 door down, moving within the next 6 weeks. Two moving "up" and one transferred back to Japan. I have no interest in going anywhere. (By the way, the word verification can be pronounced, "ellen devil". That's my feelings toward someone with that name this morning--weird!
When my parents moved after 37 years in the same home, we briefly considered an "Arson Committee." Passed on it. But it was tempting...
A Viking funeral for a house?
Hmmm...my parents sold our farmstead (my dad's family home) to an Amish family, I drove around the old neighborhood several years later, and was devastated -- in a totally irrational way, of course -- to see that the new family had walled up our beloved front porch, chopped down one of our venerable apple trees and otherwise altered the place to the extent that I really didn't want to go back again.
Smiling at #5
I had to replace Tapestry because I wore it out.
Burning might be the most appropriate thing for my house too. I moved a lot with my parents but once I got to be in charge, I stayed put. I also never throw anything out which makes arson the most attractive option.
Oh, I like that Carol King song too.
And I used to LOVE Haley Mills. I wanted to be like her. I remember (odd the stuff one's brain grabs on) going to see Moonspinners. I was about 14 and developed my first crush--on actor Peter McEnry, who no one remembers. I do however. :-)
I wish I knew the secret to adjusting to a move that your online friends have. I have found moving to be an incredibly difficult experience....and I wish I could overcome it. I really, really wanted it to be more positive than it has been.
I wore out both Tapestry AND Blue too.
Oh! I LOVE Hayley Mills in the Trouble with Angels. I laugh out loud every time I see it!
Prayers for all the "issues," GG.
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