Moving Day...

Life is changing among my family these days. My mom will be retiring in December and getting married in January. In preparation for that she is currently in the process of selling her house so that she is able to move to the bustling metropolis of Marlow, OK. I've never been there but oh the stories they tell and the songs they sing about the place. (FYI - I'm kidding. I can't imagine anyone singing about Marlow. I mean who wants to sing about life in the backwoods of the biggest hick state of them all? I can't imagine that lighting anybody's fire. But then I think of the humongous hit that was the musical "Oklahoma" where they sang about honey lambs and surries with fringes on top and I guess I figure that means there might actually be a market for these sort of things...anyway, I digress).

So my mom is going to be moving. This will be the first time in my lifetime that she has moved. She moved into the house where she currently lives in October of 1976. I was born just two months later. For thirty years she's been living in the same house, accummulating an unholy amount of crap. Tomorrow she has a walk through and next Monday she'll sign the thing over to somebody else. I do get a little emotional when I think about all the memories from that house.

One of my earliest memories is when my sister was born. I don't remember much about it since I was only two but I do have some vague recollections. I also remember sitting on the bed in my parents room with my brother and sister when my dad told us he was moving out (not all the memories are happy). I remember holidays and just hanging out. I remember getting out of school and playing in the snow. Growing up it was the only house I had ever known and I can hardly imagine anyone other than my mom occuppying it.

One of my last memories in the house will be of moving out the unholy amount of crap. Because she's living in transit for a few months and the guy she's marrying already has a fully equipped house (it even has electricity and indoor plumbing - he's the envy of all the other citizens in Marlow) her furniture was doled out to her children and others. Because we know the depths of our laziness and that it would never get done if stretched out we decided to move it all in one night. My brother happens to be moving too so we decided to move his stuff from his house in the same night. We were zig-zagging all over town, hauling all kinds of furniture, rearranging the junk between my house, my brother's house, my sister's house, and my mom's house. I'll never forget hauling a one-ton entertainment center into our house at midnight, drenched in sweat and barely lucid. There were six couches, three beds, two massive TV's, and a refrigerator that refused to fit through the door (**to the woman buying my mom's house - I'm sure you can use a touch up pen on those door frames and no one will ever notice). It took somewhere around ten hours to get it all done and as I was laying down to sleep at 2:30am, knowing I had to be up in about 4 hours, I thought to myself...we do all right for the dysfunctional family that we are.