I hate moving. I suppose just about everybody hates moving, unless they happen to be in the moving business. But I have been offline for the last ten days because I have been up to my eyeballs in packing boxes.
This move was a little different from most because I was moving into a house that was already furnished. With storage units just about nonexistent in New Orleans right now (and IF you can find one, the per-square-foot rental is more than an apartment; about $12 a square foot at one place I called), I decided to do the time-honored practice of converting the garage into a storage unit. Nice idea, except after a heavy rain I discovered that water gets into the garage, especially in the ruts created by eighty odd years of parking cars in the one-car garage (the concrete has long been broken all over the place). So I managed to locate three wooden pallets to put stuff on, which helped. Did I mention the garage also has no doors? So I ended up nailing a 12 x 9 tarp (purchased on my last trip to Atlanta, because most of the tarps in New Orleans are already on roofs) across the opening to keep the rain out (secured at the bottom with bricks). This won't stop a thief, of course, but it beats the heck out of paying $240 a month for that amount of space in a storage unit.
So...stuff had to get moved out of my grandmother's house into the garage to make way for the new stuff coming in from the country house. And some of the stuff from the country house ended up in the garage (I am saving it for a friend who lost her stuff in the flood). And this week all the stuff of two houses and several people's lifetimes ended up crammed into one house. It's a little cramped right now. And you should have seen all the stuff that got thrown out before the move.
There was stuff that was my grandfather's, my grandmother's, my uncle's, my mother's, two second cousins', and mine. If I get to see my ancestors in the afterlife, I am going to catch hell from them for throwing out their stuff. One of my neighbors came by and picked a lot of old photos out of the trash pile. She was astonished that I was throwing them away. But they weren't identified and I didn't know who they were, and I have several hundred that didn't go on the trash pile. My neighbor said she would make collages out of them. I feel a little better.
The day after I moved out of the country house, we signed the papers for its sale. The new owners had been flooded out of their home in St. Bernard Parish and had been living in the Midwest since the storm. They had found the house on the Internet. Even as we signed the papers, they had yet to be inside the house. That's pretty scary. I apologized for all the dead bugs that showed up against the walls when we moved the furniture out -- I didn't have time to vacuum -- but hey, at least they were dead. (I did remove the partly eaten, very dried out dead lizard that my hunting cat managed to push under the stereo cabinet.)
I hope the new owners enjoy living in the country house. It was a place of refuge for me after the storm, and I hope it will be a place of refuge for them. I hope they let the grass grow in the back yard in the spring so they can see the wildflowers. I wish them all the best as they try to rebuild their lives. It won't be St. Bernard Parish, but I hope it will be home for them.
Back to Cattown, U.S.A.:
The cats were locked in their cat carriers in the dining room as the movers carried furniture and boxes around. When everyone had left and it was quiet again, I let them out. They recognized "their" furniture pretty quickly. Their sofa, their chair, their bed, their porch furniture! They forgave me for locking them up and settled in for their late afternoon naps.
And now it's Christmas Eve, and I'm off to a small town across the lake for a preaching gig. I will sub for another minister for Christmas Eve and Christmas morning services, so he and his wife can visit relatives out of town. Time to take a deep breath and get back to being Pastor Kathy again.
Merry Christmas!
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