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Progress Report

February 23, 2007

See, I told you I wasn't going to be glogging blogging much this week and next. It isn't just that moving eats up time and saps your energy; it's that moving makes you boring. All you can talk about is moving. On Martha's Vineyard, however, this isn't the liability it is in some other places. I run into friends and acquaintances at the grocery store or the p.o., or walking down the street. "How you doing?" "I'm moving." Other person pulls the kind of face you get when you report a death in the family and pretty soon you're exchanging moving stories, landlord stories, how-I-found-a-year-round-rental-in-June stories . . . Moving stories are the island's lingua franca. Even people who pay mortgages and property taxes and plumbing bills have them. Many of them were renters once: they did "the shuffle" -- moving in the spring, moving in the fall, crashing on sofas, living in garages, or tenting in the woods in between. Or the only way they could pay the mortgage and still have a little disposable income was to rent their houses to summer people by the week and move in with relatives till Labor Day.

The really good news is that I've now moved two pickup-loads of stuff to the new place and I still love it. My ideas about space arrangement are still evolving, but they're taking shape. This morning I placed two ads in the M.V. Times Bargain Box (free ads for cheap stuff) to get rid of things that I'm not going to need and don't want to move. Anyone want a big, comfy, ugly easy chair? How about a square end table, almost two by two feet? or a funky kitchen table about three by four? Free for the taking; can be taken anytime. The end table and the chair were part of a bunch of stuff I bought from the family of my predecessor in this apartment. The kitchen table was scavenged by my neighbor up the road who knew I wanted something to put my microwave, toaster oven, and hotplate on.

Friday is trash day in my neighborhood. Among the recyclables I put out were three bundles of magazines, mostly horse- or writing-related. They were worth saving, but they weren't worth moving and finding a new place for. Moving makes you ruthless. Moving makes it easier to let go. If I didn't move, I'd be one of those people who's walled in by thirty years' worth of old newspapers, or who has eight years of New Yorkers stashed in the closet which she swears she's going to catch up with someday . . . Right. Someday the house will burn down or she'll go blind and she'll be regretting all the closet space she lost all those years to those damn New Yorkers.

Tuesday a couple of friends are going to help me move stuff, especially my "office" -- computer and peripherals, desk (aka two two-drawer file cabinets, my once-and-future bread-kneading table that doubles as a keyboard platform, and the desktop, which was left over from a waterbed-frame-building project of a colleague of mine from 25 years ago), shelves, and (surprise) more books. A friend is lending me her big Ford F350 for the project. My phone will be switched over on Wednesday morning. The only thing I haven't done is hire someone-or-two to move the bulky stuff. I confess: I'm procrastinating, partly because I'm cheap and partly because I can't quite accept that I can't move a full-size bed by myself.

Rhodry likes the new place. He's checked out the apartment; he likes the outside stairs better than the shiny inside ones he has to negotiate where we are now. He's done some exploring in the woods, found the compost heap, and told a neighbor dog that in future all visiting will be done on his terms. Bare walls where bookshelves used to be, open boxes on the floor, however -- these do make Rhodry uneasy. He sticks closer to me than usual and doesn't stay outside as long. He probably has his own take on the whole thing, so watch this space for further reports.

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