Adventures in Moving!

It has been a very long week.

Actually, it's been a very long Wednesday.

This week I helped an elderly friend move to Poughkeepsie, New York.

This comes after a particularly disastrous experience in the same vein from a year or two ago. I took the chance. This woman, whom I will call Grace, has some real challenges in her world, not the least of which is two kinds of cancer for which she is receiving chemotherapy. She also has some mental health issues, namely Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Bi-Polar Disorder. Both are managed well with medication, but they do affect how she handles life and how life sometimes handles her.

Moving is a huge endeavor. Moving in order to get closer to potentially life-saving medical treatment must be more stressful than I can imagine. And doing anything as huge as this while working through Grace's particular dual diagnosis, well, let's just say that I am humbled by her bravery. Please keep this in mind as the story unfolds.

Grace asked me to help her move maybe six months ago. I said sure, and she expected to move in late August or September. Then there were complications and her date got indefinitely postponed. Something about paperwork, Section 8 housing vouchers, availability, and the like. I didn't understand it, but understanding that part is not really my job anyway. I am support staff in this adventure. So anyway, about a month ago, I got a phone call saying she could move and we looked at a calendar and figured out a date when we'd do things. She called and ordered a truck and a tow dolly for the car and we set about getting her some boxes and tape. She packed and packed and packed, and as she packed, she would ferry carloads of boxes to a rented storage unit so she could still move around in her apartment. Makes sense, right? Well, it seems that the damned things breed. She had an apartment full of boxes AND a storage unit full of boxes, AND there was stuff that still needed to be packed in the last minute.

Late last week, I got a phone call that she was overwhelmed with the packing chore. Laura went over and spent a day helping, and another friend came and packed up a bunch for her as well. So she had only a few minor things to pack up on the last day, so we figured we'd all be OK. At 7 a.m. on Wednesday, I met her to go get the U-Haul truck. It was 17-feet long, not very big, but my packing skills are legendary, so I figured we'd be close to OK.

Did I mention that she had TWO rented storage spaces? Yeah. Both 10 feet by 10 feet, one packed with household things and the other with her art supplies. Grace is a talented artist, working primarily in oils on canvas, although there seemed to be a lot of fiber art stuff there too. Anyway, she had a ton of shit to pack onto that truck.

I enlisted some volunteers (bribed with cookies, actually) and we started moving stuff into the truck. The light boxes went up in the over-the-cab compartment, the couch went up against the front wall, mattress and box spring wedged in beside it on the right, and then we started packing for real. Full-sized beautiful wooden desk and shelf unit, beautiful birch (maybe pine?) headboard and foot board, bureau with mirror, dining room table, chairs, recliner, all of the normal things came out of that apartment and into the truck. Pack, pack, pack, squeeze, wedge, shove -- it was like a three-dimensional game of Tetris. Oddly-shaped things would come out via a volunteer and I would find a place for them on the truck. Tall things, wide things, skinny things, breakable things, pole lights and hat stands and beach umbrellas and walking sticks and boxes and more boxes. I wrapped the nice wooden pieces so they would not scuff and scrape against each other, and I packed that sucker to the roof, jamming thin little things up in there to wedge tight so as to prevent the load shifting once we got on the road.

Halfway through the morning, Grace had to go for her nearly four-hour chemotherapy treatment. We waved her cheerfully off and remembered again why she needed us. We set about our task with greater resolve and humility.

I left Laura and one of our volunteers at the apartment to finish the boxing and cleaning, and I took the other volunteer and the truck over to the storage facility. The truck was over half-full already, and Laura had warned me that BOTH rooms were pretty full. Oh dear.

Well, I had told Grace that we'd prioritize her household stuff first, and if she had to hire me or someone else later to bring down a truckload of her art stuff, then that's what we'd do. We got there to find both rooms pretty much as described: one was pretty full, the other was about half-full and much more loosely packed.

There not being much to do really except start, that's what we did. I stayed in the truck (always my post in moving someone) and M (a big, strongish kind of guy) schlepped boxes from inside the unit to the tailgate. He stayed busy, and I mostly kept up. I found a little wooden chair that had a crushed velvet seat cover that came off. Inside was a bunch of sewing supplies - needles, thread, bobbins, all that stuff. It obviously went with the sewing machine table (did I not mention that? Yes, she had a heavy, antique sewing machine table) but it was perfect for me to stand on to put boxes all the way up to the ceiling. I moved it toward the back of the truck as the truck became more and more full. Packing carefully, we cleaned out the household unit in short order. There was still an encouraging amount of room left in the truck, so I decided that we'd try to clean out the art supplies unit too. M began ferrying canvases and boxes and all kinds of things to the tailgate, and I worked to make them all fit in the truck.

A word about New England roads. Roads here are often rutted and bumpy, and yes, I mean the paved roads. Our dirt is interspersed with what we call "ledge" which is actually the granite underpinnings of the North American continent. What covers that ledge is a mish-mosh of different kinds of dirt and rock and sand. Some is gravel and well-drained. Some is mud and marsh and muck and can get squishy. Some is topsoil, which is scraped away and put on people's lawns to grow grass. The point is, our roads, and yes, the paved ones, get compacted by traffic. Especially heavy vehicles like tractor-trailer trucks and motor homes and tour buses and the like. Not to mention the normal kinds of daily traffic that all roads see - town plow trucks, dump trucks, garbage trucks, concrete mixers, the beer truck, the Coke truck, the home delivery oil truck and all the rest. The point is, our roads get a little beat up and you can expect to roll from side to side a bit when you drive on them. So, anything standing up in a truck could well fall over in a drive as short as a quarter-mile.

So, things that were big, delicate, or prone to tipping or shifting got tied to the wooden side rails inside the truck. I had a nice chunk of rope left over from some project or another, and I simply tied things to the rails, cut the rope there and moved on. The Ironing board got tied to the rails. The bed's headboard and foot board got tied to the rail. Some bookshelves got tied. Anything that looked less than secure got tethered. I had no time to offer therapy, we just tied shit down. If there was insecurity after the move, then that was something that could be dealt with in New York.

So, after that primer on roads and trucks, you can understand why everything got tethered that could get tethered, and the rest got wedged in tight and snug. We got back to the apartment and packed in the last handful of boxes. Grace came back from her treatment and did the last of the kitchen things while Laura and I came home to get my suitcase and any final last-minute things.

Laura drove me back to Grace's apartment, we cleaned the last of everything out, loaded the car, loaded the truck, loaded the car onto the trailer, strapped it down, put the cat carrier in the front between Grace and me, grabbed a big box of Goldfish crackers out of Laura's car, kissed my sweetie goodbye and headed south.

Grace was worried about her cat. She'd spent the previous night in a motel, with the cat, and he had yowled all night. Wednesday he had watched with obvious disapproval all the comings and goings as his possessions (all are his, I understand this) were packed up and taken out of the apartment.

Now, I have met this cat before. He is nearly 18 years old. I know his daily routine generally consists of competitive napping. Like for 26 to 32 hours each day. No kidding. So now we're in the truck and the cat has not moved in his carrier. He has not yowled, he has not complained, he has not moved. Grace is afraid he might be dead. We pull over after 30 minutes and she hauls him out. He's fine, if tired and disgruntled. She holds him on her lap for the rest of the night's journey. He sleeps.

Of course he slept! He normally sleeps for over 20 hours a day, and I had witnesses who could attest to the fact that he got NO sleep on Wednesday as the packing was going on. Apparently, he'd had no sleep the night before in the motel, because Grace assured me that he'd yowled all night and kept her awake besides. So now the poor precious beastie was sleeping. Good for him. He'd been terribly disrupted in the past couple of days.

We drove a couple hundred miles, and in the dark bitter cold and a stiff breeze, it took us about 5 hours all told. The wind was buffeting the truck as I drove, and by the time we stopped after 11 p.m., I was truly exhausted.

We stopped in Amesbury, Massachusetts at a motel just off the highway. Grace went and checked us in while I parked the truck and its trailer. We smuggled the cat in the back door in his carrier, and then his litter box and then our overnight bags. I called Laura, told her where we were and said good night. There was some drama when Grace discovered that her overnight bag did not contain the things she had hoped, but she made do and we turned out the lights at just past midnight.

yowl.

yowl.

YOWL.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Rustling in the dark. Murmurs of comforting words.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

More rustling. Some thumping and clicking of cases and carriers.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

I tossed and turned and turned and tossed.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

I pulled the blankets over my head.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

I pulled the pillows over my head.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

More thumpings and rustlings in the dark. Doors opening and closing.

(somewhat muffled echo effect here)

yowl.

yowl.

yowl.

The cat was in the bathroom.

Which was next to my bed.

Yowl.

Yowl.

Yowl.

At five a.m., I finally said "Grace, please DO something."

She said something, I don't remember what, but it was not unkind. I think it might have been apologies, and then there was some more opening and closing of doors and it was quiet, save for the normal motel room heater noise.

My aunt called my cell phone at 8 a.m. to sing good morning and ask when we'd like to meet for breakfast. I nearly strangled her through the phone.

Sigh.

I showered, dressed and packed my bag. I gathered Grace and the cat, who was now napping peacefully in his basket in the front of the truck, and all his gear, and we went to breakfast and then hit the road.

The next 225 miles took us almost 6 hours. Again the wind was fierce, and we ran into some traffic near Danbury, Connecticut, but as a rule the roads were fine and we moved along pretty well. We turned north in Fishkill, New York and traveled up the Hudson River Valley through some of the most beautiful scenery I have ever had the pleasure to see. I don't remember ever traveling up this stretch, and it was simply beautiful. I understand now why this section of real estate bred a formidable cadre of artists in the last century or two. Wow.

We pulled up to Grace's new apartment building in time for her to grab her key, take a look at the place, make sure the carpet was actually installed (there had been some concern about the timing of that project) and then we headed over to the artists' gallery space where she was going to store some of her work and supplies.

Bless her heart, Grace had the good sense to call a Poughkeepsie Christian High School to ask for some volunteers to help her unload. What met us was the principal, a teacher, and a half-dozen clean-cut boys from the Tabernacle Christian Academy of Poughkeepsie, New York. They unloaded the art stuff at the art place and then we all carpooled back to the apartment building for the rest.

I stayed with the truck while the teachers and boys all went up to Grace's 12th-floor apartment. Soon we had an assemble line of sorts, with boys and men carrying boxes and furniture to the elevators, then ferrying them up to the top floor and unloading them, then back again. The truck was unloaded in record time.

The adults had to leave, but some of the boys stayed. I brought up the cat in his carrier and set him up in the bathroom where he could yodel in tile-surround echo-chamber happiness AND use his facilities without risk of being trampled by enthusiastic teenagers. And then Grace and I had to settle up.

See, she hired me for this job. Only I know that she was running out of money. So that made it tricky. I told her that I would work for pay to pack her stuff and load the truck, but that I would donate my time driving and unloading if she would just pay for my meals and motel room and buy me the necessary train/bus tickets back home. So she paid me some cash, I returned the truck to the rental place, and one of the young men - nice kid named Frank - brought me to the station to catch the 7:40 p.m. train to Grand Central Station, arriving at 9:25 p.m.

Dawn's adventures in New York - and Connecticut - and Rhode Island - and Massachusetts - and New Hampshire - and finally, Maine - tomorrow. Stay tuned. It's about to get good.