Moving Stuff

Yesterday I spent over three hours being reminded of an ever-vital life lesson as I helped an acquaintance move from her run-down, dingy apartment. A horse trailer and three pickup loads later, half of her belongings were stored in a garage adjacent to her new mobile home, which became available today.

I wasn’t the only person helping. Two ladies from church were packing boxes as one of the acquaintance’s grocery-store coworkers and I carried furniture and stuff, stuff, stuff down the stairs, where the husband of another coworker told us where to put the metal desk, the Christmas tree, the Halloween glow-in-the-dark skeleton someone had found in a closet, the grimy card table, the filing cabinet holding a folder labeled “loan documents. Throw away when I die” and old Hardy Boys books, an in-chair back massage thing, Rubbermaid box after Rubbermaid box of who knows what–you get the picture.

After our morning of work, the acquaintance went to buy pizza for us. Just before she came back, one of the coworkers explained to the church lady that she was going to “wash these” for the acquaintance, “these” being two brown owl hot pads. A bit later, though, after the pizza had arrived, I heard that coworker say to the other coworker, “I’ll put these out in the car now; she’ll never notice.”

It’s true–the moving lady really would never notice. Today, several men from church and I helped haul the rest of her belongings from her old apartment into her new trailer, and move her things from Saturday’s storage into, well, the same trailer.

The new landlady observed throughout. “My husband died twenty years ago, and so I’ve learned to do things on my own,” she said after I suggested waiting to load a dresser onto my truck to take from the garage to the trailer, and then she showed me how to load it easily. A bit later, as we walked towards the trailer, the landlady toed a flattened, dried up toad: “Oh, look at this toad; it’s croaked.”

Someone mentioned how good ice cream would be. “I don’t have ice cream,” the landlady said. “All I have is iced tea.” That sounded really good to me, since I’d given the second half of my water bottle to an older man who was helping and feeling dizzy, but she never brought any out to us.

In the trailer, the acquaintance was sitting on the couch, which was the one accessible piece of furniture besides her bed and the kitchen table. Everything and everywhere else, including in front of the kitchen sink, was piled high with boxes. What actually seemed rather spacious at first had quickly become jam-packed with, well, junk.

“I don’t even know what’s in most of these boxes,” she said. “I guess I’ll have to have a yard sale.”

Out in my truck, right now, in my driveway, is a large dresser that she didn’t want any more (and that would not have fit into her new home even if she did want it). I agreed to take it to the thrift store tomorrow.

I’m going to take some of our furniture, too. When it’s time for us to move, and people show up to help us, I know full well how they might feel to be enabling my stuff habits.