of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
SOME FOLKS down the block have sold their house and soon will move to another neighborhood. They've bought a place more suitable to present need and in this I'm happy for them.
But I'm saddened, too. They're the kind you like to have around, the kind you can drop in on for chatting purposes or for borrowing a cup of sugar or a ladder. And I'm prepared to shed a sympathetic tear when the moving ban backs up to the curb and transportation of their household wares begins.
FOR MOVING is as maddening an experience as ever confronts the human animal. Never, until you're involved in it, do you realize what a store of worldly goods you possess and how much of it, originally retained for sentimental reasons or against some time of need, has faded into the limbo of forgotten junk.
My father, who could muster a fair temper even when not beset, became a fiend incarnate whenever the family moved, which happily was not often. I would as soon have been set down beside a wounded grizzly and wondered what on earth possessed the man. Twenty years and a couple of moves of my own later, I found out.
The fellow who now lives next door moved in a couple of years ago and had I, personally, never been caught up in the toils of moving I'd have counted his coming a calamity. He did much of the moving himself and, while straining under tables, chairs, sofas and such, showed all the amicability of a rattler, scaring not only his own kids but every juvenile in the area. But I recognized his mood as a phase that would pass.
ABOUT the only good thing to be said for moving is that during the forced inventory you turn up articles you thought had been carted away by mistake in that scrap-metal drive of World War II. A five -year period of mourning I wasted on a departed ax was broken one moving day. I found it resting across the garage rafters. For years I blamed my son for loss of a pipe wrench. One moving day I found it behind the furnace. I'd deposited it there and forgotten it.
You should take at least a month to move out of one place--and a year or two to move into another. We've camped in the same abode for 10 years now and the attic still bears evidence of the hasty improvisation implicit in every transfer of duffle.
AND THAT one month you ought to take in preparing to abandon a place does not insure full preparation. Invariably, after the movers arrive, you find candlesticks on the mantel and pictures on the wall that must be herded into cartons, along with cans of pickles, paint and sundry bric-a-brac.
Then, after you've moved everything that can be lifted, you note the dirt. You simply can't leave the place looking like a hog barn. What would the people who moved in think? So you borrow some cleaning tools--yours have departed with the van--and muck out.
BUT THE physical torment of moving is less severe than the emotional. You leave some of yourself behind when you leave a place you've lived in long. All about are evidences of past days. Here is where your children have grown up. Those grooves in what once was the nursery floor were worn there by a baby bed, pushed back and forth during endless evenings of lullabies. Those tiny holes on the inside of the front bedroom door were left by thumbtacks which supported pictures of daughter's high school friends. The dent in the baseboard recalls that long ago Christmas when your son strapped on his new roller-skates and made an unwise and amateurish trip across the living room, tipping over a table lamp en route.
The first floor lacks both bath and bedroom, though, and the place is drafty and hard to heat, difficult to clean and keep in repair. Better get rid of it and move into something smaller now that the children are grown and gone. It sure will be nice to live in a house that doesn't have a squeaky back door and doesn't creak as if bewitched whenever the wind blows.
BUT YOU have to start out fresh, somehow, when you move, even though the shift be only to a different neighborhood. It takes time to recapture the feeling of home. The new place takes getting used to. There's no peony bed or apple tree out back to shout the glory of every spring, no rosebushes to shelter against winter kill, no scuffs on the wallpaper to recall a rumpus between two sons, no pencil marks on the kitchen door to record their growth.
All these the old place had. They are the warp and woof of family living, the stuff of memory. Pain and heartache, exasperation and disappointment, happiness and comfort are there enshrined.
You can get away from an old home, but it can't get away from you. That's the big reason why it's hard to move.
Copyright 2013 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.
No comments:
Post a Comment