I'm feelin' all y'all ... (like that?) ... who have moved recently, or are moving now, or soon. My office is also preparing to relocate. Today is Clean Up and Pack Up Day, meaning: We're wearing shorts!! (I always wonder what in the heck these moms DO, that they get to wear shorts and tennies when they drop their kids off at the daycare. Today I was one of them, though. Maybe everyone is moving.) And we had a free pizza lunch woo hoo!! And we are dirty and lugging heavy things about.
Moving always makes me think of when my family "up and moved" from Texas to Florida. And that's exactly how we did it, too -- "up and moved." It was like, all of a sudden, hey, we're leaving this stinkhole and moving, so ha, ha, all you people who are still stuck here..... Okay, it wasn't quite like that, but it was pretty sudden, as evidenced by our then Aunt Lovely, who refused to ever speak to us again because she thought we'd kept her "in the dark" about our plans, on purpose. Or some such baloney. Suffice it to say, it surprised everyone, most of all, us. We were Established in Cow Town, Texas. We were Country Club Members. Dad was on the Bank Board (of what, I don't know -- Trustees?). Our name had meaning behind it. Our grandparents helped build that town. And here we were going to pack all that up and transport it to the big city? Unbelievable to many of our friends and relations.
It didn't transport -- the reputation, I mean. We became little fish in the big ocean, if you consider Pensacola big. Which we did. But the enormous plusses of Pensacola definitely outweighed the minus of our "status" in Cow Town. Someday I will tell you about my charmed childhood, though. For all its cow-relativity, the original hometown was a pretty great place to grow up. It was all sunshine and high cotton. :)
What did transport was our STUFF, and lots of it. As a homeowner myself, I now understand how easy it is to accumulate So Much Crap You Think It's Going to Take Over and Eat You For Lunch, and we've only been in our house 3 years! We lived in our 4BR/3.5BA house in Tejas, with a large basement, for about 10 years. So you do the math. Those Mayflower guys had plenty to do to get us out of there! When they arrived 6 weeks later at our brand-new house in Florida, we unloaded. And we kept finding these boxes labeled "Chester Drawer." What the...? Who is Chester? "Ohhhhh, we finally figured out: Chest of Drawers. This box of stuff must have come from the dresser. (I think that, in the South, we don't have "chests of drawers." Nor "bureaus" -- although I think I knew that term from reading Nancy Drew. Seems like she must have found a clue or two in an old, New England-y bureau. But mine, and my mom's and sister's, were dressers.)
More puzzling than Chester, however, was Ida. Boxes upon boxes were delivered into the new house, labeled Glass Ida. Guest Room Ida. Blue Room Ida. Backyard Ida. She was omnipresent. This Ida had claimed everything as her own! Who WAS she and what did she want with our stuff?
Seriously, it took us about a day to decipher the code. Maybe you've already figured it out. Like the sunlight returning from behind a cloud, we finally got it: Items. Glass items. Guest room items. They were abbreviating! We have laughed about that phonetic mistake ever since.
So today I'm channeling Ida and labeling my personal boxes. Hope none of my Ida. get broken. :) Ah, memories.
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