Swiss Family Hill

The sun shone brightly on August 28. Dave was well again, but pale. We returned the rental car and sat outside the hotel waiting for the limo to JFK. All around us were our smallest subset of bags. Two checked bags and a carry-on bag each. We owned no more property in the US. The house and the cars were gone. We had said our goodbyes to Jake and Ben and my sister Linda and the folks back home. All of the little strings that tether you to who you are and where you belong have been cut.

The limo drove unimpeded to the airport. (The day before a huge sign was knocked down onto the highway blocking traffic for hours!) We were scolded for the weight of our bags, but if I could pick them up so could the baggage handler. I had no sympathy for them at this point. Dave escorted me to the lounge to wait. Since he travelled so frequently, he knew a lot about how to pass the time pleasantly at the airport. (When I had flown out alone to meet him in Europe last summer, I didn’t get to sit in the fancy business class lounge sipping free drinks! I got to avoid the drunken travellers who waited for the overdue flight on the hard little chairs while drinking $5 bottles of soda. Hmm. )

We used up the rest of our cell phone battery calling relatives and friends for one last goodbye. Almost no one was home. Work was still going on across America, I guess. No holiday had been declared at our leaving.

We boarded the plane. Business class rocks, by the way. The seats are huge and they recline all the way and you get to board first. I got to watch Slumdog Millionaire on my own little screen. I ate tortellini in cheese sauce with a nice side salad, and for dessert we ate Ben & Jerry’s ice cream sundaes (Dave’s favorite part of travelling!)

All the work is done. There are no more big decisions to make for this move. We are on a conveyor belt now where everything is moving along without any input on our part. Someone else if flying the plane. Someone else has our air shipment. Someone else has our household goods. Our boys are capable and living on their own. There is a temporary apartment awaiting our arrival. The apartment we’ll live in is nearly ready for us. A sense of calm came over me. I relax.  (That’s what that feels like!)

The list for our last day in Monroe was as long as my arm. We had sold the cars to a local dealer and we now had a rental car. However, we needed to make at least two more dump runs, take the last pile of boxes to storage, turn the plates in to the DMV, take the forms from the DMV to the town hall tax assessor, drop off reports at the church, clean the fridge, the bathrooms, the whole rest of the house, turn off the utilities, and when all was done we were heading to New York City for a much needed rest- dinner at my favorite Italian place followed by cookies from Ferrara’s and a stroll down memory lane.

Except Dave got sick. We were sleeping in a hotel in Trumbull the last two nights since they had a bed and we didn’t. He came down with stomach flu version 2.0, a much bigger and badder version, apparently. He was s-i-i-i-c-c-k-k-k! And he couldn’t help with the above mentioned list. He could only p-u-u-u-k-k-e! So I did it ALL.

I got up at seven a.m. after about four hours sleep. I worked like a dog until about ten that night, then dragged our suitcases from home to the hotel to crash. I stayed up hours later, transcribing calendars and address book entries from the scraps that lived on the bulletin board and on the fridge. (It’s funny how you rely on these alternate storage spaces! You can’t bring the fridge door with you though.) Our storage unit is full to the max. We could probably still fit a tic-tac in it, but not much more. And everything was heavy! I know he didn’t plan it, but his timing was amazing. Dave owes me big time! There will be no trip to the city. No cookies. Sigh. I’ll have to find a new favorite Italian place, maybe in Italy!

Fortunately, Dave’s work has always been for organizations that know how to move people. And they have packed us up and unpacked us at the other end. This is not to suggest that there isn’t a ton of work for us to do, but it does take some of the pain out of the process.

This time some of the pain was figuring out what was allowed by customs to be packed and shipped, and forms had to be filled out for everything. We had to fill out a whole page telling them we aren’t bringing any liquor. I wondered if there was a similar form letting them know we weren’t bringing a hippopotamus.

One of our Coast Guard moves stays fresh in my mind- I was returning from my dad’s funeral the day the packers were showing up to move us from Monterey back east. Dave had stayed with the boys while I flew to Massachusetts and back, as he had to finish details of his schooling and flying back and forth with a four year old and a baby was too much to arrange on such short notice. As I walked into the kitchen upon my return, the packers were wrapping packing paper around a FryDaddy- a deep fat fryer- still filled with cooking oil! Imagine if that had gone into a box and sat in storage, leaking smelly used frying oil on all of our belongings! There is a certain amount of preparation involved in a happy move. That’s what Dave has me for!

This time all open foods, all open cleaning products, all flamables and dozens of bottles of paint all found their way to other homes prior to the move. Important papers were set aside, including the titles to the cars we still had to sell. Yellow vinyl tape warned the packers not to pack the contents of certain cabinets and shelves. This was all routine stuff by now. Except I got sick. Pukin’ dying, stomach virus sick. But there was no time for that, so I pushed thru and stayed up late and everything was ready. Because you know they’ll be here at 8 a.m.!

The packers arrived and all was set to go. They complimented me on how organized everything was. They had the container our goods were going to travel in on a flatbed in the street. It is a huge forty foot shipping container. Our worldly belongings filled half of it. Everything taken out the door was wrapped in layers and layers of white packing paper. Even the tables and chairs, which in previous moves had only rated an inventory sticker, were wrapped for mummification. We winced as the big flatscreen TV was swaddled in cardboard and not a wooden crate. Fingers are mentally crossed for its safe arrival. We commented to each other that we’ll need to plant some trees to balance the ones cut for all this paper.

Dave sat in the corner of the empty family room with his remaining computer and phone, working thru all of this. He was on a conference call when I figured out how to take my bike apart and get it into the shipping box. (It may never be the same! Pedals are taped to the frame, the handlebars dangle like dislocated bones.)

They were done in no time. The house echoes. Pack ‘em up, move ‘em out, ..

We were fortunate to have such wonderful friends in CT. They took us out for goodbye dinners all the last week. It wasn’t really goodbye, more like auf wiedersehen.