A rental truck and some friends

"Mary's Little Life" is a blog I get to via Paul's blog. (One day I'll bookmark it, but since it took me several months to bookmark my own blog so that I could get to it without having to use David or Paul's blogroll, I suspect that day won't be any day soon.)

Anyway, she has this neat thing where at the bottom of most posts, she has a summary and a link to a post from that day in a previous year. Sometimes I click, sometimes I don't. Today was a clicking day. I read her post from 2003 about helping "Writer Guy" move and it brought back a bunch of memories of moves in which I have participated. Like ....

Helping Hengist and Kathy move. This has not yet been topped by anyone in my crowd and we've participated in some Godawful moves. Hengist was moving from a house in Wheaton, maybe, that he rented to one somewhere in PG County that he bought. Kathy was his housemate in those days and so she conveyed.

I must mention here that Hengist is one of the nicest people on this planet. They don't come better than Hengist. We love this guy. He's great. Really. But after we looked around his place in horror, we had to inform him that one never, ever, ever gets boxes the size of coffins and fills them with hard-backed books. That's just wrong. Especially as Hengist has more books than your average university library. (All of my moves and all of my friends moves have included dozens if not hundreds of boxes of books.)

Kathy had helpfully emptied out the water in her water bed. Pity that it was January and she had emptied said water from her bedroom window onto the front steps. Ice skating and moving the aforemetioned coffin-sized boxes of books really wasn't compatible.

We still talk about that move with lots of hand waving and eye rolling and scaling up of voices. I think it was probably 10 years ago, too.

Or when we moved Bill and Emily into the adorable little house they bought. For some reason, the house has one area with a really, really short hallway and 5 doors. Well, four doors and an arch. But the hallway is only large enough to accomodate those doors. (The house also used to have a kitchen so small that your choices were two people could be in the kitchen or the fridge door could be open. There is a lovely addition now with the new wonderful kitchen and the old kitchen is a pantry, but "Five Corners" - as I call that hallway - is still there.) Emily has a cedar chest that she wanted in the bedroom. If the living room was door #1, the bedroom was the immediately adjacent and perpendicular door #2. The cedar chest was very large and the hallway was very tiny. In fact, standing on its end, the cedar chest was nearly exactly the same size as the hallway, which would leave an insufficient amount of room for the human beings wrangling the chest. Getting that chest into that room took more time, effort, and ingenuity than the whole rest of the move. Not to mention the temporary repealing of certain laws of physics and geometry. We told Em that if they sell the house, the chest conveys, unless she has an axe handy on moving day.

Neva and Ilana knew that their large sofa was never making it into the elevator. How they got it in the apartment, I don't know. Perhaps it was assembled in there. None the less, it wasn't coming out via the elevator. So the guys threw it off the balcony. And then dragged it to the dumpster.

I've participated in a lot of August moves where either the old apartment or the new one or both were a third floor walk-up. I did one of those this past summer, in fact.

And the fact that my friends can tell similar stories about my moves is why I'm staying in the condo. I like helping other people move.