ROADBLOCKS, DETOURS and ROUNDABOUTS

I am in overdrive. I feel an inner trembling, the fluttering of a heart that’s beating too quickly. My mind is all over the place, thoughts rushing in at lightning speed, reminders of things I have yet to do: notifying the post office, the bank and our creditors of our address change, cancelling our phones, our satellite service, our property insurance. I am so rushed that I have stopped mourning the sale of our home. There is no time for it.

We move in just six days.
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Allowing just four weeks to pack and move out is something I will never do again. Packing goes quickly when you’re taking everything you own. In our case, we have loads to get rid of, and loads we can’t bear to leave behind. Everything I pick up to pack must go into one of five groups:

1. Things we will need for the interim while we are living with our friend “M.” Thank goodness for him!

2. Stuff (a lot of it!) that we will store until we find our a new place.

3. Things my son will try to sell at a garage sale on Saturday.

4. Things we will give away to charity, mostly clothes and dishes

5. The rest, garbage for the dumpster that sits in our driveway.

Tomorrow, the first of our storage units will be delivered. It’s a very cool system. We pack it to the rafters and then call the company to pick up the first unit and deliver the second. The plan is to move on the 14th.

And all I can think of is “I’M NOT READY.” Forget the fact that my emotions are all over the place. I am not finished packing. There is food in the fridges to use up. The pantry is nearly, and the freezer has a few things we’ll either have to give away or force ourselves to eat: frozen pizza, perogies, two bags of a cheese/pasta/vegetable concoction. There are hamburgers and loads of ice cream, frozen vegetables, frozen bread and buns – most of which is already in freezer-burn hell.

My son is handling the garage sale and it will be casual, at best. If he had his way, he’d grab our stereo system and bookcases and extra television to sell. If I had my way, I’d sell his hundreds of magazines. I’d also sell a lot of things my husband wants to bring, like his desk, and his handbuilt solid cedar water wheel, a mere six feet in diameter, his 30 year-old car manuals. He’d toss out my older nightgowns and shirts he doesn’t like, and most of my books would disappear. Last night, his “sentimental gene must have been asleep at the switch – he started to throw away mementos from our sons’ school days: drawings, projects, a Grade 3 journal. My son was horrified, my husband stupefied, and me, I was simply fried (it’s been HOT here). There is no truer line than “One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.”

I need to get to bed now because tomorrow has an early start. I pray I drift off quickly. These days, I need a muscle relaxant and sleep medication to get a solid eight hours’ rest (sleep pattern difficulties and muscle stiffness and pain is part of fibromyalgia, a chronic condition that can make me pretty miserable and whiney – but that’s another story, just as tedious to write as to read read.) The good news is that the meds do help a little.

Thank goodness, because tomorrow we are even more under the gun. If we’re crazy busy, I’ll have less time to feel sad. I might even manage without my daily little cry. And that’s a good thing. That’s progress, isn’t it?