The Move (across the border of sanity)

Moving is a stressful experience for everyone, I’m sure. It’s taken me four months to recover from our move to Idaho Falls, although I still have this uncontrollable twitch above my right eye anytime someone uses a form of the verb “move.” But that’s fairly common, right?

My husband’s new job required that he move nearly a month and a half before we did; I was left to oversee the sale of our home. Our first buyers backed out a couple weeks after they made their offer. We had disclosed termite damage in the basement, and when their inspector encouraged them to have someone verify that there was no current activity, they walked away. That made me, prone to emotional hyperventilation, a basket case. What if we did have termites? What if we never sold our house? What if we never sold our house and had to commune with termites until the walls fell to the ground like sawdust? I practiced due diligence and had my own termite inspector come and see if we had any live critters (picture me rocking back and forth in a corner while a complete stranger thumps on every piece of wood in our house with a hammer and pick). He cleared us and we continued to show our house.

And after a couple more weeks we had another offer. A good offer. A solid offer. A seemingly irrevocable offer. But that didn’t calm my troubled mind. Oh no, it teased my mental stability. I could hardly sleep, and every time my realtor, “Bird Dog” (yes, our realtor called himself “Bird Dog”), phoned my cell I got the dry heaves.

But our second set of buyers signed the paperwork and that fateful day arrived—the day when, with the help of my mother-in-law, I finished cleaning our house and locked the door behind us for the last time.

My nerves, buzzing like a downed power line, put everyone on edge, including our two cats who were resisting transport. But finally, close to ten o’clock that night we checked into a hotel where the kids soon conked out, strewn across a double bed. My mother-in-law and I stayed up late watching CNN while talking about how relieved we were to finally have the house cleaned and the U-Haul packed. You’d think we were home free.

But no. We still had one cat to loose at the hotel, two vomiting fits to endure on the drive, and a rain storm to pass through sans windshield wipers. But we did arrive at Idaho Falls, September 22, 2006, each nerve intact. Who ever said moving was difficult? (Does someone have a wooden spoon I could bite on?)