We’ve moved. Finally. And parts of me think we’ve jumped the gun.
We’re in pretty good shape here, but we’d be a little more comfortable if we’d waited another 2 weeks while shelves, drawers and doors get made. That’s the way it always seems to be, though: one excuse or another, and what’s really forcing the issue here is that Celia had to move into the green house by 7/1. This is exactly the kind of kick in the butt we needed to get going.
So we moved.
Last fall, I told Mary that, as soon as I could shit and shower at the new house, I was going to move. For her part, she wasn’t going anywhere until the master bedroom floor was done.
My first shit.
My first shower.
The master bedroom floor.
The Ladies’ Lounge
After all this time, we still didn’t really have a plan about where to put the furniture or ‘stuff’. So Friday, when we took 2 trailer loads out of the Hellhole, we piled the whole thing in the Ladies Lounge (aka my office) because it happens to be the closest room to the trailer. DISH had hooked up the TV on Thursday, and it wound up somewhere behind the pile. Next day, we took 2 loads of furniture over and stood it all up in the living room, unsure where any of it was going to go.
(Last spring, when we moved from Westford, the trailer’s left rear tire kept going flat, and replacing the valve stem fixed it. Over the winter, the right rear tire went flat, and I inflated it with a portable air tank. It lasted a few hours, but it was flat the next day. I took it off to have the valve stem replaced, but they told me that not only was it leaking through the sidewall, but the rim was close to rusting through. Even so, with its new valve stem, it didn’t go flat for over a week. The next morning, though, the right front tire was flat, and I plan to replace the valve stem. Meanwhile, I park it within reach of an air hose and keeping a wary eye on the front left tire.)
Mary’s first drink.
Saturday night, we had dinner here for the first time. Mary made beat up chicken (my favorite) with one of her birthday wines, and I made brownies. We sat out on the back porch and read for a bit, used the oven for the first time, cooked on the stove, chopped at the counter, sat in chairs at a table on a carpet, washed our dishes in the sink, and loaded the dishwasher. All for the first time.
It was a little surreal for me. All winter, I’d done all my thinking and working and relaxing in the basement, and I only went upstairs when I had to ‘put something in.’
When I’m “bent to the task,” I make little mistakes, and when I try to ‘back up’ enough to see how the big picture is shaping up, my view can be clouded by the flaws: It’s too big, or a detail is imperfect, or a leftover hole somewhere, or it’s way late, or not done yet. Or not started. But sitting at the table, on a rug, in a room full of furniture, with Mary and a meal in front of me, I looked around and, like God, I saw that it was good.