Until Then

 Just the other day I asked the Marquis de Sade what his favorite method of torture is.

He said "Moving".

Carol and I are suffering like dogs. Every day we get up, have a cup of coffee, watch an episode of Law & Order and then..........get back to packing.

We have lived in this house for 37 years. Which makes it an endless torture chamber of shit that has to be dealt with. Everything takes three times longer to do than you expect because there are endless layers of miscellaneous shit that has accumulated.

I believe this is the most physically brutal thing we have ever dealt with. And right near the top of the most psychologically brutal things we have ever dealt with.

We are 69 years old, for Christ sake.

There are days when we spend 3, 4, even 5 hours dealing with this shit. Packing. Carrying boxes. Filling trash bags. Walking up and down flights of stairs. Over and over and over again. From the second floor down to the first floor down to the basement and back up again. There have been days when we only lasted a couple of hours. We are frazzled, overwhelmed and short-tempered.

People ask me why we didn't have the movers do the packing.

Impossible. We have had to weed out so much shit we would have  had to look over the movers' shoulders and say "pack this, trash that, separate this" 1000 fucking times.

We are exhausted.

Endless trips to the dump, to Goodwill, to Home Depot for boxes and tape, to the liquor store to get empty boxes from my friend who manages the store.

Every day we go as long as we can, maybe an hour at a time, then we sit for 15 minutes. Then we get back up. And every time we get up it gets harder and harder. Until we can't do it anymore.

Then we collapse for the night. And get up in the morning and do it all over again.

Four more days to go. Feels like an impossible task. Like we will not get it done.

But we will.

And we will be living in a beautiful new home living a renewed life in a new town. Starting over so late in life. Magic.

Until then it all fucking sucks.