I spent virtually the entire day yesterday helping to launch two people on one of the greatest adventures of life: Moving! As in, moving house. As in, packing all the detritus of your life into cardboard boxes and hauling them from point A to point B. And when I say “one of the greatest adventures of life” I mean of course one of the biggest pains in the ass humankind has ever devised to transform life into the most agonizing torture ever. My Darling B and I have moved our own house six or seven times in our twenty years together, so I feel I speak with the wisdom of experience here.

Jim & Sue are moving. They sold the house they’ve been living in for twenty-some years so they can build their retirement home in the country. Somewhat oddly, they haven’t actually built a retirement home to move into yet, so we didn’t help them move into a new place to live. Instead, we helped them move most of their stuff into a U-Store-It ten-by-twenty garage where it will remain until such time as they have a home to retire to.

Their retirement home is, at this time, a vacant lot. Quite a charming vacant lot, as vacant lots go. Two acres of land at the peak of a gentle hill with an outstanding view of the other vacant lots, carpeted with lots of waving field grass and studded by several picturesquely gnarled oak trees. But still vacant. Construction on the retirement home will begin this summer, if I got the story right, and until then the happy couple will semi-retire to a temporary home in a rental (or, as my Texas-ized brother would say, a rent home).

Moving began first thing in the morning. I wasn’t there to see The First Box loaded into the moving van because My Darling B and I did a little grocery shopping at the farmer’s market before heading over so they started without us. There were many, many boxes to load onto the truck, however, so they still had plenty of work for us to do when we finally got there.

Moving the boxes went fairly smoothly. Boxes are easy to carry, stack in the back of a truck, and unload. Very simple. Children learn to do this in kindergarten with wooden blocks. It was during the second round of moving things, when almost all the boxes were gone and we had to move the furniture, that the fun began. Furniture doesn’t stack neatly. It’s not supposed to. Just about every stick of furniture ever made is designed to stand on the floor right-side up, so that’s how you have to put most of it in the truck. If you’re really inventive and really, really careful, you can make some of the chairs ride piggy-back, or lay a book case on its side across the top of a dresser or a table, but there’s only so much of that you can do, so the truck fills up rather quickly.

And there almost always seems to be one piece of furniture that’s monstrously large, or heavy as a planet, or both. In our house, we used to have a pair of book cases made from oak plywood, both about six feet tall. One was only four feet wide; we still have that. The other was about six feet wide. It wasn’t especially heavy but its size made men from Germany to Japan cuss in an amazing variety of ways. On our move to Germany, they tried and tried to get it up the stairs and, when they couldn’t figure out how to get it around that last bend, they simply left it in the court yard and were about to drive away when I asked them what they were going to try next to get it into our apartment. “We can’t,” was the answer. “It’s too big.”

“So you’re just going to leave it here?” I asked. He shrugged. Apparently, he thought that’s exactly what he was going to do. I eventually talked him into trying again, and the crew put their heads together to come up with the brilliant solution of using a fire hose to hoist it up to a balcony and bring it in that way, but for a while it looked as though we might have to forget about the book case.

And for a while I was thinking Jim might have to forget about taking his table saw with him. It wasn’t an especially large piece of hardware, no bigger than an end table, but it was a table saw from back in the day when they made table saws from six-inch-thick battleship armor. The body of my table saw is made from high-impact plastic and the whole thing doesn’t come to more than twenty pounds. Jim’s table saw probably tips the scales at something in the neighborhood of two-hundred pounds. Carrying it up the basement stairs should have put any two healthy men in a hospital.

Jim’s Plan B for getting the saw out of his basement work shop involved taking it apart to make moving it much less hazardous to his health, but disassembly turned out to be a lot more complicated than it first appeared to be so he reverted to Plan A, grabbed the bull by the horns, so to speak, and wrestled it up the stairs with the help of his son-in-law who, thank Zeus, is half my age and strong as a horse. Getting under that saw and muscling it up the stairs still made his eyes pop out, though.

Getting everything into the storage unit was every bit as challenging as getting everything into the truck, times two, because we could fill up the truck twice and be as sloppy about it as we wanted, so long as we could close the door, but we had just one try to get all the boxes, furniture, shovels, rakes, bicycles and whatnot into the storage garage so we could close the door. And somehow we did it. Not sure how, don’t really care. It’s in there, the door’s closed, the day is done.

We finished packing away the last of the furniture and assorted hardware late yesterday afternoon. I don’t know exactly when because I was too exhausted to look around for a clock. All that was left was to drop off the truck and head back to Jim & Sue’s, where we could flop our butts into the remaining lawn chairs and wolf down some brats and potato chips. The end of the day found us sipping beers under their back yard pergola, telling stories until well after dark.