Swans


 

A Moving Carol

by Alma A. Hromic

May 12, 2003

 

[Author's note: My husband, Deck Deckert, and I recently moved from Florida to Washington state, just south of the (Canadian) border. While it hasn't always been smooth sailing, the compensations have been more than worth it...]


On the first day of moving my true love gave to me
One shiny new front door key.


Well, all right, I skip and jump a great deal. This was hardly the first day of moving, as such -- but it was the first day I allowed myself to get excited about it. Up until now it was all up in the air -- sell one house, buy another, heaps of paperwork, odd words like "escrow" floating about (what does that MEAN anyway...?) -- but now, finally, they handed us a key. A real key. That opened a real door. I practically cried. It was not the end -- it was not even the beginning of the end, as Churchill once said, but it was the end of the beginning of this move. We were home -- it was an empty house when we walked into it, granted, but it was ours, now it was really ours, and the cedar trees outside nodded and smiled as I stood in the cavernous echoing bare-walls living room and cried.


On the second day of moving my true love gave to me
Two moving trucks
And one shiny new front door key.


Lord, and don't I mean it. The first one turned up at the Florida place with a gravel-voiced driver who was so laid back as to be almost sitting in an armchair puffing Cuban cigars rather than running a huge semi full of other people's belongings. He and two other strapping young men (one of them was allergic to cats, and our house brought him out in hives) packed up our Florida household and took off into the bright morning. The next time we heard from them, by phone from our Washington place, our driver laconically informed us that they were "Stuck in the Mid-West" in a snowstorm -- and, well, they'd get there when they got there. When they did turn up they phoned to say that they could either deliver our stuff that night (at nineish) or else two days later. Having lived in an empty house with nary a chair to sit in for too long, we rashly opted for that night. The movers turned up and promptly wedged the front door open so that they could bring in the stuff. By the time they were done, I could no longer feel my feet due to terminal frostbite (it was early March, and outside it was probably below freezing) and what had been a traveling cold had descended firmly into Deck's lungs and lodged there in the shape of an annoying hacking cough which wouldn't go away for another six weeks. Barely had we survived that onslaught when the second truck, the one from New Zealand with all MY stuff in it, announced its imminent arrival. It came with two polite and competent but very disgruntled handlers who discovered that they were expected to double-handedly deal with a VERY heavy walnut piano and were given no tools or help to do this. It proved impossible to unload the beast outside the house because they would have killed themselves or wrecked the piano or both -- so they drove a little way up the road where a convenient hill allowed them to push it off the truck into an incline, and then they trundled it back down to the house along the road on a small wheeled dolly. God knows what the neighbors must have thought was going on. The house was now stuffed to the rafters with cardboard boxes. Who knew we had so much stuff?...


On the third day of moving my true love gave to me
Three realtors
Two moving trucks
And a shiny new front door key


Yeah, three that we wound up dealing with! We bought the house in Washington off one, listed the house in Florida through another, and wound up actually selling it through a third, who turned out to also be... but wait, maybe there were four realtors, if you count the Doofus... but I'm getting too far ahead of myself. When we came up to Washington state in November 2002 to look at houses we had three days here - more like two and a half, actually -- and Deck said we'd certainly not buy anything on this trip. But we called up one realtor (out of the yellow pages) and set up an appointment to be shown some houses. When the guy turned up to pick us up at our hotel, he took us to his company's offices where he proceeded to look up the houses we'd found on the Internet before we came there (and which we showed him as the kind of thing we'd be interested in) and ONLY those houses. What's more, the walking anachronism did so out of a realtor book, citing computers as "unreliable." He took us to three houses, all of which WE had found ourselves beforehand, and got lost twice doing so. Then he took us back to the office and politely inquired where our car was, having apparently completely forgotten that he had picked us up at the hotel in his own vehicle. One whole precious day down the drain, as it were -- not only did he show us nothing new, he completely failed to even listen to us when we tried to talk to him about what we were looking for. There was a lot of head shaking going on between me and Deck behind the Doofus's back. The second agent was much more of a live wire, and showed us several places one of which we immediately liked. We actually went home, sat on it for a week, and made an offer on the place. The WA realtor was onto the deal like a beaver, nibbling at things here and there, making things happen, getting us a mailing address long before it was technically possible to do so after our offer was accepted. The faxes flew thick and fast between FL and WA. Who knew we had to sign that many things? This realtor recommended a colleague in Florida who could sell our place there -- a prerequisite for the Washington deal happening. The Florida fellow sat down with us and methodically went through the houses selling in our area, using their asking and selling prices to set a price of almost $100 000 for our place. A bit high? Perfectly realistic under the market conditions, he assured us. When the place finally sold -- through the earnest efforts of another agent entirely, since our listing agent didn't seem to be bringing too many clients to the place -- it was for almost 20% below that asking price, and our listing agent said to us, 'But we were pushing the envelope.' We growled a little, at that. The truth of it was, we could probably have got that hundred grand -- but we had a deadline, and the agent who actually sold the house knew it, and we got enough to buy the house we wanted and a nice young couple bought our old place so everything worked out in the end but the range of realtors out there and their attitudes is still staggering. I don't know that I'd do better if I had to sell or buy again -- but I learned a lot during this process. Most particularly that I don't much like the used car salesman pitches, and being treated as though I am a slightly backward child. I think realtors are used to people being befuddled by the dozens and dozens of pages of small print they have to sign here, here and here and initial in fourteen different places -- but I am not, and our Florida realtor was actually moved to inquire with an edge of acerbity as to when I'd be taking my realtor's exams because I knew my way around the contracts better than he did in the end...


Four different seasons
Three realtors
Two moving trucks
And a shiny new front door key


We moved to Washington in the tail end of February. The place was still wrapped in winter, branches bare, skies grey more often than not. But there were signs of spring all over. Crocuses and daffodils and then, later, tulips and hyacinths were popping out all over (although it actually SNOWED one morning in late March, and the drifts developed into an honest-to-goodness blizzard by nightfall...) . Glorious pink flowering trees seemed to be a fixture in every garden, and then they faded into crowns of bright red young spring leaves and were replaced by white-flowering trees, and another four kinds of pink-flowering trees, and then magnolias, and then lilacs. Trees slowly took on a mantle of green -- first willows, then beeches, then maples, then poplars. As April slipped into May the place started to resemble summer. We know that the maples will turn golden yellow and shed their leaves come September or October, because we swept a couple of seasons' leaves off the upper deck when we moved in -- and we've also seen pictures of the woods turning to fall colors and resembling an impressionist painting, and we can't wait for that. This place has seasons. If you look out of the window you know what time of the year it is. You can wear sweaters and sandals, in their turn. What a wonderful place we have found.


Five kinds of trees!
Four different seasons
Three realtors
Two moving trucks
And a shiny new front door key


We were told we have half a dozen red cedars, a Douglas fir, two big-leaf maples, a hemlock and a beech wood on our property. And that's not counting the lilac we just planted (and are still nursing), and a bunch of little Christmas tree-type firs just off to our right, and holly bushes, and thickets of blackberry brambles cascading down the slope of our back yard. The ground is a rich black muck composted from fallen leaves and conifer needles. Compare that to Florida. Sand, and palm trees, and, um, palm trees, and palm trees... We LIKE it here.


Six kinds of wildlife
Five kinds of trees!
Four different seasons
Three realtors
Two moving trucks
And a shiny new front door key


When we first got here and drove into the area which we would eventually call home, I squealed out loud when I saw a rabbit hopping across the road. On the same day, driving back, we saw deer stepping out of the woods. After we moved here on a permanent basis, we've had the deer grazing in our front yard, much to my unalloyed delight; another specimen practically kissed me through the driver's window of the car as I drove out of the central mail collection area the other day. This is not to mention the ones that pop out of the trees and trot delicately off down side roads while you're on a stroll through the neighborhood and get to see them close up and personal, their dainty hooves beating a gentle tattoo on the tarmac. We've seen half a dozen rabbits bouncing about the place. And the other night, up on a first-story deck, we saw a raccoon promenading about the terrace peering into our bedroom in a vaguely lascivious kind of way (perhaps he thought we hid food there). We've been told that there is a cougar that comes visiting occasionally, and someone said that a black bear or two has been known to come down from the hills. I'm in hog heaven -- every time I look out the window there's a squirrel on the cedar, or the possibility of a deer munching on a dandelion. And this isn't even taking into account the two birdfeeders we've put up, and the two bluejays I've named Moss and Stumpy (after their preferred feeding grounds) who have taken up permanent residence here. I think I saw an owl the other day. And apparently there's a place just down the road where you can go in December or so and watch a battalion of bald eagles feast on spawning salmon laboring upstream. I mean, wow. The best I've seen in Florida, outside of animal parks, is three catfish swimming in a deep puddle in the middle of the street, left over after a huge tropical storm, and a bunch of roadkill armadillos.


Seven different contractors
Six kinds of wildlife
Five kinds of trees!
Four different seasons
Three realtors
Two moving trucks
And a shiny new front door key


There is always a 'but', and in this instance it was a question of 'the house is beautiful but needs a lot of work downstairs to be habitable'. New desk for a new home and lifeThe first set of remodeling was kept in the family, as it were, with the huge concrete hole that was the downstairs being transformed into a wood-paneled office by Deck's older son. He performed a small but definite miracle in a frighteningly short period of time. We now had a glorious office, a downstairs sitting room, a separate laundry room. But oh, the bathroom downstairs... it was perfectly functional, as bathrooms go, but it lacked an entire inside wall and it was just the same kind of concrete hole that the rest of it had been before it had been transformed. Enter the contractors -- strip the old bashed up drywall with holes in it, replace it with new drywall, rehash the fourth bedroom/storage room next door and put up an outside wall in THAT so that we don't have bare dirt spreading cold dampness into the house, replace junky old bathroom fittings. That's all after the guys came to clean our roof and our gutters. And after the guys came to install the closet organizers. And after the guys came to install the Internet. And before they start on the upstairs to replace a double-paned window unit in the living room which somehow leaked and is now an interesting effect of uncleanable splotches impossible to see through. Mess, dust and trouble. And that brings us to...


Eight piles of rubble
Seven different contractors
Six kinds of wildlife
Five kinds of trees!
Four different seasons
Three realtors
Two moving trucks
And a shiny new front door key


If it isn't one of Murphy's laws, it ought to be. If you hire x contractors you'll end up with x+1 piles of rubble, and you're never quite sure where that last load came from. By the time the office and sitting room was done, we had (and still have, to some extent) a huge heap of bits and pieces left over out back -- pieces of discarded flooring or paneling, cracked old drywall, bits of wire, piles of sawdust. The new contractors pulled up old carpet and old bathroom fittings and more cracked drywall and old bashed-in doors and all of THAT is now sitting in the front awaiting collection. Every time the house is vacuumed there's a ton of dust and muck picked up. Will we ever be clean again...?


Nine rolls of bubblewrap
Eight piles of rubble
Seven different contractors
Six kinds of wildlife
Five kinds of trees!
Four different seasons
Three realtors
Two moving trucks
And a shiny new front door key


When we packed things, we wrapped them in heaps of old newspapers and bits of bubblewrap. We actually bought ROLLS of bubblewrap, and used them all, somehow. Don't ask me how -- EVERYTHING can't be fragile -- but it was there and it went. Naturally, on the other end, we unwrapped everything. Now there are piles of ripped up bubblewrap and clinging bits of masking tape drifting about the house as everything gets unpacked slowly to our satisfaction ("What is this, and why did we wrap it, and why did we BRING it, and where in blazes are we gonna keep it?"). The stuff is clingy, and sticky, and it seems to be breeding, seeing as there's always more of it than I thought there was the day before. It keeps on emerging from the bottoms of closets or under the beds. It's scary. The other packers, the New Zealand ones, used large quantities of packing paper instead. We could have built a life-size replica of the local mountain range with those papers by the time we were through with them. And oh yeah, there are still...


Ten thousand boxes
Nine rolls of bubblewrap
Eight piles of rubble
Seven different contractors
Six kinds of wildlife
Five kinds of trees!
Four different seasons
Three realtors
Two moving trucks
And a shiny new front door key


...ten thousand boxes left unpacked in the area we call the 'cave', currently serving as catch-all storage for everything we don't quite know what to do with yet. So far we have taken enough cardboard to the dump to build a house the size of the one we're living in. Boxes flatten, and you'd think this would make them take up less room -- not so, because at one point we had them up practically rafter-high out front. We keep on taking a few boxes at a time and sneakily throwing them away into the cardboard-only recycle bins set out for the local businesses in the little shopping mall down the road. There was a time when the entire trunk of the car was STUFFED with boxes and papers. And the worst of it is -- every time we think we're making headway we look into the 'cave' and realize that there are still just as many boxes left as we got rid of so far. I swear, I am NEVER moving again. Not unless I can just pick up the house like a snail and carry it with me. I may still have nightmares concerning cardboard boxes ten years down the line. (Actually, I'm almost certain we'll still be opening stragglers at that time...)


Eleven tons of books
Ten thousand boxes
Nine rolls of bubblewrap
Eight piles of rubble
Seven different contractors
Six kinds of wildlife
Five kinds of trees!
Four different seasons
Three realtors
Two moving trucks
And a shiny new front door key


And most of those ten thousand boxes contain those eleven tons of books. Our costs of moving were horrendously high, and only because 89% of the stuff we were bringing (from both Florida and New Zealand) were boxes and boxes and boxes of books. And books weigh much. And they calculate the freight rates by weight. I guess we could have got by much more cheaply if we'd left our books behind -- and in Florida we manfully waded through old shelves and only actually brought in less than half of the stuff that was there -- and we STILL managed to get ourselves in a situation where we require at least two more bookcases to take the books we brought with us. And the problem is of course that we won't now stop acquiring books. And we don't even know quite what to do with the ones we already have. This is what happens when writers move. We get grounded -- we accumulate printed matter by the ream -- it's part of our job description, for heaven's sakes! -- and then we get faced with moving all of it from point A to point B and finding space for it all. Once we fix the bathroom (well, first things first...), we need to get on with building some bookshelves...


Twelve Starbucks cafés
Eleven tons of books
Ten thousand boxes
Nine rolls of bubblewrap
Eight piles of rubble
Seven different contractors
Six kinds of wildlife
Five kinds of trees!
Four different seasons
Three realtors
Two moving trucks
And a shiny new front door key


What about coffee on this deck? Hey you thought I moved here for the scenery? And the wildlife...? This is COFFEE COUNTRY. I am a self-confessed addict. When we drove up and down Washington state and every other rest stop on the highway offered 'free coffee', I KNEW I'd come home. There's a café on every corner, and drive-through coffee kiosks where there aren't any sit-down facilities, and man, this is the life. I'm Internet-networked, I can go up to my upstairs deck with my laptop, sit on a rocker with a cup of good coffee at hand, and watch the squirrels and the bluejays quarrel over the birdfeeder against the backdrop of deep-green cedars and the spring-green maples -- a backdrop that a friend described as being almost theatrical, far too beautiful to be real. Never mind the sawdust and the unpacked boxes and the mess and the paperwork -- and even, right at this moment, all the obligations waiting for me when I resume some kind of living routine hopefully not too far in the future. Right now, I'm here, the sun is shining, and I'm in heaven, and I am home.


 
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Alma Hromic on Swans (with bio).

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Published May 12, 2003
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