It was moving day and it was predictably
chaotic. Since the movers had first
arrived, they had not stopped other than a mandated smoking break before taking
the couch, which had been wrapped in plastic, and loading it against the left
wall of their formerly empty truck.
Beds, television sets, and the entire dining room set had been loaded
into the truck before any of the children had finished packing their
rooms. The furniture was gone, and then
it was the boxes.
Each
contained a makeshift label, written in the mother’s tender, womanly
scrawl. The boxes which were labeled
“kitchen” were the first loaded: the night before, the mother had finished
wrapping all her porcelain plates, her most precious possessions. The children had been happy, as the boxing of
all the kitchen supplies meant that the family had ordered pizza for
dinner. They broke from their moping to
enjoy eating their collective favorite food, as the entire family laughed and
talked about the old house, and all the memories that happened inside it.
Under
the father’s watchful direction, the movers finished with the rest of the
kitchen, saving the boxes labeled “fragile” until the very last into the large
truck. They began to move the boxes from
storage and from the living room, which was a quick and orderly affair. Next came the master bedroom, and each of
these was meticulously labeled by the father, with specific contents written
underneath the words “master bedroom.” He had taken his time with each of them
while directing his wife to his organization pattern. He told her he wanted to make sure that he
knew where everything was, because he couldn’t be worried about things missing
while starting his new job.
The
children’s rooms were the last to be loaded, each done by the children
themselves, some with parental oversight.
The teenaged sons were unlabeled, crammed into various boxes without any
real worry what was in there, with the valuable or important things on the
bottom. The middle child, a girl, had
hers in a style reminiscent of her father’s: organized, labels within labels,
all the things a preteen girl would care about in her preteen life. The youngest boy had his mother’s help. She had labeled all of it, and had taken the
time to ask him, before the pre-move garage sale, to sort which toys he no
longer played with, or no longer wanted.
He had complied, but it had taken him much longer than his mother would
have like: each toy was a memory that he treasured in his 6-year-old
brain. He cried some, as his mother
tried to comfort him, but eventually got over it: his new room would be bigger,
and his mother talked endlessly about the new things they would be able to
have.
His
room was the last loaded, as he had wanted some of his favorite toys with him
in the car on the drive to their new home.
He had packed these prized possessions last, carefully in various
shirts, like he had seen his mother do with her fine china. His father called up to him that he needed to
be ready, and the child ran downstairs with the final box, tripping and almost
falling. He clamored into the family
van, behind his brother whose Gameboy was already lit up. He waved to the old house with his mother in
remembrance, but a new house awaited him.
He would make more memories in that new house, like running through its
backyard with his first dog, and kissing the neighbor girl under the pine tree
in the front yard. The new house he
would never forget, but the old one? He
already had.
