Stronger than You Know, More Plugged in than You Feel

“What if every unexpected delay, postponement, or redirect, Suzanne, only meant that at the very last second, right before the scheduled manifestation, I had an even better idea?

It happens.”

~ The Universe (Tut.com)

Yeah, yeah…no doubt…bla bla bla…

Surprised? Don’t be. I have a terrible story to tell, but I admit that there always is a silver lining. As I wrote that, I had a vision of a silver aura around myself as I miraculously managed a move us and our stuff on Monday night. I wasn’t especially feeling my team around me during the process, even though I know they’re always there. My entire being was pretty much occupied with getting the work done.

It was brutal, and it feels appropriate to pen a righteous rant about the experience. I’m sorry if it’s long and boring. I think I just need to be witnessed.

♥ ♥ ♥

As you may know, my daughter (“Yo”) and I were given exactly one week to find a place to live for a month, presumably the last stretch before we can go back home.* This unfortunate news precipitated a whole avalanche of necessary activity (after the tears and sobbing): basically processing 14 months of post fire accumulation into what appropriate spaces could be found for them.

I’ll try to get the story into a bullet-pointed timeline kind of format, and may I just say from the start that I never want to do any such thing as this move again.

“Ski condo” means that from the parking lot to the door, there are 10 steps down, and 16 steps up to arrive “home.”
“Airbnb” means a space already stocked with foods we mostly can’t eat, with very little room left for what we had to bring.
“Loft” means a big, beautiful roomful of wasted space, accessed only by a very narrow spiral staircase. Bleh.

Friday, May 23: I had movers bring most of our stuff (I thought) into a POD in my driveway at home. Kind of a big day.

Over the weekend: I secured a storage space and brought some more things over to it in 3 trips with my car.

Monday, May 26 (Memorial Day): I rented a van that Yo and I filled up with as much as our bodies could manage to bring down from the tower. To say that it was already an exhausting day doesn’t quite match how we were feeling. Fortunately, our landlady had mercy on us and let us leave the bed and two dressers at the house for fetching the next day.

We arrived at the condo around 11 pm or so. That’s when I first learned about the stair situation. I parked the van as close to the stairs down as I could, and that’s where it remained for the whole time I was unloading.

I have to add here that neither Yo nor I have been super interested in food of late. We already weren’t eating enough, and I didn’t actually plan for any of this, and certainly not how to feed us as we labored through our (basically) forced move. I’ve literally lost ten pounds over the past month, and there wasn’t a lot extra on me to begin with.

Yo had already been having fatigue issues, and she helped as much as she could. When she started getting an aura and the tingles of a pre-migraine situation, I just told her to rest, trusting in my heart that I could manage whatever had to be done.

Picture a 9′ van chock full of musical instruments, amp, basically all the food we had in the house, what clothes and kitchen stuff we might want for the month, and pretty much everything we had that wouldn’t do well in a hot storage unit. There was a LOT more than I thought there was, and unloading and getting everything down and up all those stairs was immeasurably trying.

I was literally praying the whole time for strength and endurance, and to not trip over my baggy jeans on the stairs! I would stage a group of things at the top of the ten steps, then get all of that bunch down and over to the bottom of the 16. When I had the juice (and sometimes when I didn’t), I brought things partway up for Yo to grab when she could. Two heavy items we carried together at the end.

Once the van was empty, I had a 40 minute drive to bring it back to the rental place. It was 3 am when I returned to the condo, and I can count only a handful of times in my entire life when I’ve been so truly happy and grateful to get into bed.

Tuesday, May 27: I didn’t care to bust out bright and early to get going on the last part of moving, so it was early afternoon that I found myself driving down south to score some boxes and finish up packing. On the way, landlady called to question me, saying there’s a lot more than furniture still at the house and I better be out by 9 that evening.

I was going to ask her for another day because I had help for Wednesday, and she said no. Anxiety was kept at bay somehow after that call, and I imagine when there’s no choice but to soldier on, we just find a way to do it. So I went to the hardware store to get boxes, over to U-Haul to rent another van, then on to the rental house to pack up what turned out to be a crapload more stuff.

Yo went online from the condo to secure moving helpers through U-Haul. Shout out to them for saving the day for me, actually. No one else was around to help, and they came through in a pinch.

I packed more things up while waiting for the movers. A father and son team from Ecuador arrived at 7:15, and they were really very helpful and masterful packers of the van. They loaded it up, and then followed me to the storage unit (close by), where they got everything either into storage or into my little car.

At the end, it was a rush job for me. I ran out of tape, and I forgot one cabinet that had our Beast mugs and Ninja blender in it. I was told they went in the trash, and in my heart, I hope that somebody gets to use them. It’s getting easier to accept loss these days. I don’t doubt that’s an aspect of the tenderization process we seem to be going through.

Anyway, I dropped off the van (again) and got back to the condo around midnight on Tuesday. I unloaded a few more things, and when I got to the top with the last of what I would be bringing up that night, a sharp and uncharacteristic pain in my left hip got me limping around, once again very happy to climb into bed.

Wednesday, May 28: I had to go south again to meet the guy who refinished my antique bedroom set, which is rather huge, and put it into storage instead of into my nice new bedroom that doesn’t exist yet. I’ll need to get that very skilled fellow out here again to retrieve it from storage and set it up at home when it’s time, because it’s loaded into that unit like a handsome puzzle.

♥ ♥ ♥

I wish…

We’re now in recovery after overusing our bodies. Nova (our beloved elder kittycat) is a champion. She’s doing well, and only stressing a little bit. She’s better off than we are, really. Her needs are being met, and there’s now very little normalcy for us. A bit of normal would honestly be a comfort right now.

I’m resting my hip by avoiding stairs as much as possible, but I have to go food shopping at some point, and I do have to head south again for a few things on Monday. And there’s more stuff in the car to bring up.

The issue is that we had to get our selves and our things out of a large 3 bedroom house in short order, and into: a 16′ POD, a 10×10 storage unit, and a small, already stocked Airbnb loft…it’s not like packing for vacay or even for moving from one place to another. And it bugs me here to have so much clutter around that there’s no place for.

Life right now just feels unreal and unnatural. As much traveling I did in my early 20’s, with no true home to speak of (and only myself to look after), I’ve never felt more untethered than I do now. If that’s the point, and this is all about letting go of the Earth experience with very little to hold onto…I have to say, Mission Accomplished.

Yes, we’re grateful for lots of things, always.
Yes, it’s all going to work out in the end, bla bla bla.
Yes, we’re all together, and home is where the heart is.

I just need to say what is so at this time, and if we go a little quiet and complacent for awhile, it seems a better path than one of cranky resistance.

I was able to do this by the grace of God, and for the fact that I’ve been doing Pilates for 9 years now. That work sure has paid off. In closing, I’ll just say out loud that we will NOT be doing the move from here back home without help when the time comes!