Where Did I Put That Box? The Exhausting, Humorous Reality of Unpacking After a Move

I have been gone since the 9th.

Not missing.

Not kidnapped.

Not living under an assumed name in another state.

Just busy.

There is a difference, although at my age the distinction occasionally becomes blurry.

The last few weeks have involved moving, unpacking, cleaning, fixing things, finding things I had already unpacked, moving those things somewhere “better,” and then spending twenty minutes trying to remember where “better” was.

Moving when you are younger is an adventure.

Moving when you are older is an inventory of joints.

At twenty-five, you pick up a box and carry it across the house.

At sixty-something, you stand over the box first and consider your options.

Can I slide it?

Can I kick it?

Can I convince someone younger to believe moving this box will build character?

There are negotiations now.

The knees have opinions.

The back has a union.

The shoulders have filed a grievance.

And somewhere around the third trip across the room, the body begins asking whether we truly need everything we own.

The answer is apparently yes.

Especially the things we have not used since 1997.

Those must be carefully packed, moved, unpacked, examined, discussed, and placed on a shelf so they may continue not being used in a new location.

That is tradition.

Meanwhile, life did not stop simply because we moved.

There was work.

There were appointments.

There were family things.

There were church things.

There were meals to make, dogs to feed, clothes to wash, things to repair, and approximately fourteen thousand little jobs that each claimed they would only take five minutes.

Five-minute jobs are liars.

They travel in packs.

One loose faucet becomes plumbing.

One box becomes a closet.

One chair out of place becomes rearranging the entire room because apparently furniture has opinions too.

Then there is the strange experience of getting settled.

For the first few days, everything feels temporary.

You wake up in the night and have to remember where the bathroom is.

You reach for a light switch that belongs to another house.

You walk into a room and forget why you are there.

That last one, to be fair, followed me from the old house.

Eventually the new place begins to feel less like somewhere you are staying and more like somewhere you live.

You learn which floorboard talks.

You learn where the morning light comes through.

You learn which cabinet door refuses to cooperate.

You learn where the coffee belongs.

That last one is important.

Civilization depends upon knowing where the coffee is.

And somewhere in all of this, writing got pushed to the edge of the table.

Not forgotten.

Just covered up by boxes, paperwork, extension cords, screwdrivers, grocery lists, and whatever that thing is I have been stepping over for three days.

But I am back.

The dust has not completely settled.

The house is not completely finished.

I am fairly certain one box is still hiding from me.

And there are probably twenty-seven things I should be doing instead of sitting here writing.

That is precisely why I am writing.

Because sometimes life becomes so busy that we begin treating everything we love as something we will get back to later.

Later is a slippery fellow.

He is always promising tomorrow.

So this morning I pulled the chair back out.

Set the coffee down.

Found the keyboard.

Found my glasses.

Found another pair of glasses I was apparently already wearing.

And decided it was time.

We have moved.

We have survived.

We have discovered several muscles I had forgotten existed.

We are older than we were when this adventure started, which seems unfair considering it has only been a few weeks.

But the porch is still there.

The stories are still there.

And I am still here.

So, after an unscheduled interruption involving boxes, sore knees, misplaced tools, and the occasional conversation with an appliance that refused to cooperate…

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.