Moving

It's another teeth-chattering day. I don't mind 20 degrees, but I'd rather have that as a low instead of the daytime high! The hot soup we had for lunch really hit the spot. It truly has been the type of weather to make you feel sorry for the ones who have to work outside – our mail carrier didn't look too comfortable as he trudged up to our mailbox today.

I'm catching a “House Hunters” episode, a Federal worker being transferred from New Orleans to Fresno who was given only five days to find a house. Watching her stress of having to find a home in such a short amount of time brings back so many moving memories.

For a kid who grew up on the farm, I had very little experience with moving until just before my 17^th birthday. That's when we moved off the farm into my Grandmother's house next door to the school. Once we started moving the furniture I volunteered to stay in the house in town and unpack.......so I didn't have to go back and look at the farmhouse. I wouldn't have handled that well.

And so it began. Within a year and a half of that move, I left home and settled into the dorm at college. That consisted of hauling everything I needed to the dorm in the fall, calculating what I would need at home during the six-week Christmas break, then moving home in the spring. I guess I should also add in there three different dorm rooms during my freshman year. And at the end of my second year of college, the nomadic life really kicked in. The frequent moves were job related, and I often found myself moving into a home I hadn't seen until the moving truck pulled up. That's always interesting. The first stop was three years in Wichita, and from there it was a long move to Portland, Oregon.

That move was one of the more memorable ones. Another couple shared our move, and we misdiagnosed how much trailer room we would need. Loading got very stressful as we had to decide who got to take what, and what had to find a new home at the last minute. And the trip was eventful, too. The wife of the other couple got sick every morning. They thought it was car sickness. I knew better, and about eight months later my diagnosis was confirmed. The husband got stressed out and got sick and unable to drive for a couple of days. So I was driving my brand new standard-shift car with a trailer (which I'd never done before) through the mountains, Mac Davis in the 8-track player.

After three more moves in Oregon, the next really memorable trip occurred.......five days, two vehicles, four kids (we had a niece at that time), two adults, and a walkie-talkie system. The first night's stop was one of the more eventful. As I was in the motel getting things squared away for that night and the next day's trip, the four-year-old pushed the three-year-old in the deep end of the pool. As he was being carried into the motel room, sputtering pool water, he was mad - because he didn't get to stay in the pool and see the fishies.

I was driving a three-speed standard-shift Ford Pinto station wagon on that trip. Those same two kids made most of the trip in the back of that station wagon and did well until the last day when the three-year-old (recovered from his dip in the pool) decided he was tired of being in the car and needed to run. So he stood up and started doing laps in the back of the car. It didn't take long for me to strip him of that notion.

Several years later in a move from eastern Indiana to southwestern Iowa, we were again doing the trip in two vehicles. Friends had given us travel baskets, so we had an endless supply of juice boxes, chips, cookies, and all sorts of junk food in both vehicles. Someone thoughtfully brought supper for us upon our arrival at the new home and couldn't figure out why the kids didn't want to eat. I was too embarrassed to tell her that they'd been “recycling” all that junk food!

To this day I'm not fond of the color yellow – it makes me think about all the miles of driving behind a Ryder truck!