Home at last

“I’ve grown hooves,” I muttered to my husband as we lay shell shocked and exhausted on our saggy mattress on our bedroom floor. Nudging my foot with his bare one, he first gasps; then brays. We laugh. We continue to stare up at the ceiling.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks. Then: silence. A blessed, meandering, continuous silence filled only with the dull throbbing of aching muscles. After a time I manage to sit up and take a deep swig of my Sierra Nevada IPA.

“This room looks like a crack den,” he sighs, “except without the crack.” Glancing about the freshly painted room with its upturned baskets of clean laundry, empty boxes and crumpled newspapers, I realize that, apart from the cleanliness of the chaos, the description is pretty accurate.

From the moment we received the keys on Tuesday, our life was consumed by the never-ending whirlwind of relocating our massive household of seven children and four pets a whopping nine-tenths of a mile away. At first blush it didn’t seem like it would be that big of a deal. I’d been packing up for the better part of a month; I swore this move would be controlled and organized. Boxes would only contain like items. And they’d be labeled, too, and enhanced by a color coding system, so we wouldn’t even need to read the label, per se—we’d know that yellow meant kitchen.

Fast forward to 3:00 Friday afternoon, with the van-return deadline looming a mere two hours away; after 72 hours of painting, scrubbing, lifting, fixing and cursing, my high-minded moving ideals had devolved into packing free-for-all. I’m found crawling around my sons’ room throwing anything and everything into Hefty garbage bags just to get the stuff over from one place to another. Mid-lug to the new house, I notice my son has filled several boxes only part-way with such important items as a floaty pimp-style hat and old Yugioh cards. And nothing else.

But I have no right to complain. It was my husband and ever-patient father-in-law that did all the heavy lifting. And when I say all, I mean EVERYTHING. Nonstop and without complaint, the two men loaded and unloaded and reloaded and hauled everybody’s all-important effects from one place to another. I was merely the painter/cleaner/furniture dis-and-re-assembler, the unpacker, and the scrubber. And taken as a whole, I got the better end of the deal, by far.

“I can’t believe we did it,” I say, my voice small and floaty. The too- recent memory of the tornado we’d just survived—five days, copious amounts of sweat, accidental bloodshed, frustrated tears over one-hundred-eighty-six boxes—began to soften with each sip of beer. The old place was cleaned to sparkling; the new place was stuffed to bursting with… well, us.

And there we sat, achy and unwinding, in our own little piece of the world. We’d made it home at last.