Current Situation

Considering that it isn’t even 9:00 yet, I decided to use this very early evening to catch up a bit. When my husband asked me how I visualized moving day, I said wistfully, “I hope we have a little time to process all these changes.” His sage reply was, “You could spend the whole day and still not have it all processed.” Well wasn’t that the truth?

I spent this past Wednesday morning running so many errands so efficiently that I was feeling a little proud of my management. I even took a picture of how I dealt with a rolling, rattly stow away in the Suburban when I was driving.

I can sprint for a pretty long time and stay relatively healthy in my spirit, but I know when I’m out of stamina for the sprint and that’s when I have to process. I just need to sit beside the road with a water bottle for a while and think about the philosophical underpinnings of the race.

I can assure you that is not what I had in mind when I was kneeling on the floor picking up trash two days ago, and packing the last bits in the girls room. I wasn’t trying for an underhanded little vacation during our moving weekend. I knew I should call the girls to come do the floor stuff but I felt sorry for them because they had  been working so much; a large percentage of the grunt work has been done by the children. Also it is much easier to discreetly dispose of unwanted items when there is no one around.

So there I was putting a few stray socks into the sock drawer when I felt the unhappy familiarity of my knee popping out of place. This has happened to me many times in my life and I usually just pull the kneecap back up and all is well. Occasionally I do a really bad one and it becomes inflamed with outrage. This was such an occasion, despite my begging the Lord and even instructing him that it’s not a good time for me to be hobbling painfully. One of the children retrieved my crutches from the yard sale pile, but even that didn’t go so well. I’m not saying I heard an actual voice, but the Lord instructed me to sit still for a while so that’s what I did. I got a little time to process.

My hope was that I could take a bunch of ibuprofen and sleep it off and I actually was able to bend a little the next day. It was our big packing day in the kitchen yesterday, with Alex’s graduation party scheduled for the evening.

I got around slowly and had lots of help from the ladies in Gabriel’s family. His dad and little brother were also here to help and they stacked most of the packed boxes in the truck on the day before moving day. Gabriel is the most amazing packer I have ever seen. If Tetris was a team sport I’d be on his team.

Last night was restless, both because of an overload of nighttime processing and an ever-present charley horse in my thigh. We woke to a beautiful morning with nary a coffee mug or a French press or a bean in the house. How could I be so unenlightened when we were packing? My mom came to the rescue by bringing us a vat of cold brew from Sheetz ,bless her heart. We dug some plastic cups out of the trash and washed them so that we could drink our coffee and all was well. The only things left in the house were the big pieces of furniture, and a number of guys from church showed up to help us load them. Also bless their hearts and I mean that with all my heart.

Some of my friends came to help clean the house as the rooms emptied. Also BLESS THEIR HEARTS! Things went so smoothly it was hard to believe. As we were eating lunch, Gabriel texted the prospective new owners about the time for their walkthrough, which is a courtesy that is always supposed to happen before you sign papers. We thought they were already in the area. Turned out they were traveling through Chicago at the moment. And that’s how it happened that I stayed back with my trailer load of canoes and bikes and my girls, and the guys took the household stuff and headed northwest. The plan is that I will meet them in the morning for the walkthrough.

I have hours of time in the comfortable guest quarters at my parents’ house to process, but I promise I didn’t try it. It’s just how it works out sometimes.