Moving Day

Every muscle in my body aches from lugging boxes. My friend Muriel moved into a senior housing apartment yesterday. For the past seven years she has lived in an apartment in Bellevue at the top of a hill, second floor with a steep staircase and she he had become unable to safely manage the stairs. She is a member of the Bellevue First Ward (LDS church), and her Bishop helped her get into a nice, low-income apartment. I love the senior citizen's complex of cabin-looking apartments, in a wooded setting. It reminds me of a summer camp.

Muriel is a hoarder, but an organized hoarder, with boxes and boxes of memories, all categorized and classified. I have enjoyed going through her belongings with her, getting to know her former life, before aging and medications have made her less able to function efficiently. I talked her into renting a storage facility for some of her books and memorabilia, which she was reluctant to part with - she likes to have all her stuff with her. Her stuff is her life-blood. At first I tried to get her to get rid of some of her belongings but I came to realize how much they meant to her. She agreed to donate a few things to Goodwill, but she would not throw anything away, so storage was really the only option. Her son Paul will have to have a huge estate sale someday.

Muriel was concerned because the weather forecast for moving day, Saturday, called for rain and snow, and she didn't want the boxes that would go into storage to get wet. So I got Adam to come with me on Friday, and we piled about 50 boxes into the back of our van and moved them into the storage area she had rented. We also tried to get the rest of the stuff packed so everything would be ready for the men from the church who would show up on Saturday morning to move everything.

I took Xena and Mimi, Muriel's cats, home with me to spend the night so they would be safe and warm and out of the way during the move.

Saturday we lugged more boxes, packed, moved, vacuumed . . . in the rain and snow. And now I'm so tired. I worked hard.

Here's my attempt at accessible poetry . . . a summary of the feelings Muriel was having as she watched us store her things away.

Moving Day

Watching, as boxes of books she read to Paul when he was young

 bleed out the door on their way to storage . . .

Boxes:  biographies of famous people, magazine stories of Princess Diana, 

and art books from her college Alma Mater, now closed . . .

Collections:  wooden boxes - her mementos of past vacations, rocks gathered from around her world, stacks of photo albums and shoe boxes with negatives organized and dated, catalogued . . .

Reminders of her Native American blood: porcelain horses, ceramic Indians, wooden figurines, bird feathers in glass vases, shards of broken pottery she hopes to mend someday . . . 

Lovely Things: China tea sets, candles that lit former homes, delicate wine glasses lovingly wrapped and packed so as not to break, a black and white wedding photo of her parents . . .

Memories: Letters from her mother - long dead, her father’s paintings on wood, photographs of happy times after she and her father had made peace . . .

These were handmade in Europe.

Those belonged to her father.

This was her 11^th grade English text book.

That sled with rusted runners - a tangible remnant of her own childhood . . .

All bleed out the door.

Her history is moving out

Into storage.