© Celine Sparks, 2023
It’s what we do about every 18 months. In the late nineties, I was giving birth at this rate. Now I’m loading up another U-haul or pull-behind trailer or church van with the seats out, and taking it to an exciting new apartment or rental house.
We were broken in during our kids’ college years. That’s an easier move physically. It wears on your heart more than your muscles and joints. In fact, with our oldest son – though we had envisioned him taking bins of decor and academic supplies – he literally had a cardboard box of wadded up clothes, and when it came time to go, he threw his phone on top, picked up the box, and basically disappeared over the horizon. It’s the X chromosome. My friend’s son still had his Mustang up on cinder blocks when it was practically time for classes to start at the campus four hours away. She’s my love, peace, patience, kindness – all the Galatians 5 accolades – friend, and I was pretty sure she would melt into a puddle when her son transitioned to the dorm, but what she said was, “I am NOT going to miss that kid for two weeks!” Move-in day does that to you.
Yesterday was the bigger move – from college to career. Yesterday it was Memphis. Boxes, Bed frames. A kitchen table. Contents of a boy closet from cleats to Mario stash. Stairs. So many stairs.
Add to this the blessing and curse that I have a beyond-my-control habit of humming whatever background music fills my mind – which is really bad when you’re doing Old Testament research so that the tune to the books of the Bible is in your mind which has the exact same melody that you sing when your dentist is drilling without enough anesthesia. (Try it without the words, and with your mouth open in the Isaiah through Obadiah part. See? Same!)
So of course during the Memphis move yesterday, all I could hum was “Walking in Memphis,” but my feet 10 feet off of Beale turned into 40 feet off of Poplar with a box of cleaning supplies. Who knew they were this heavy, especially when you’re also balancing a crockpot on your shoulder?
But man, the song is spot-on when it gets to “Do I really feel the way I feel?” I mean, if that feeling is that my feet may literally fall off their hinges, and that might even feel like a good thing at this point. If it means I feel like the humidity may be pushing into the danger zone. And if it means that if I have to balance these table leaves up one more set of stairs, I’m going to just throw them over the railing, then yeah, I understand the question – Do I really feel the way I feel?
And every single time we do this, as soon as we get the last box in the door, and we want nothing more than a cool shower and a bar of soap, we all have a simultaneous realization. This place is BYOSC – Bring Your Own Shower Curtain. We’ll never learn.
So we just go to Walmart humming, “Stinkin’ in, stinkin’ in Memphis. Do I really smell the way I smell?” And we buy a shower curtain. And a broom. And toilet paper. And chip clips. And gradually the housekeeping aisles mesh into the grocery aisles, and we find we’ve purchased a few pizzas to get the boy through the unpacking stage, and you know, about 48 Hot Pockets, and enough buffalo wings to singe his intestines until judgment day.
Not one of my kids ever picked a pleasant weather forecast for the move-in day. We’ve had record heat index numbers, so much rain we said, “Forget about the shower curtain,” and then in March of 2021, my son moved from Texas to North Alabama, and my husband drove the U-haul all the way in snow and ice. That’s cuh-raziness with a capital CUH. We wish for enough snow around here in January to build a snow-flea, and never get it. But leave it to one of my offspring to load a big truck with the contents of a house, and suddenly cars are sliding off the road, and the south looks like a Currier and Ives Christmas card. In March!
With the Lord’s help and a borrowed van, we’ve done it again. We’ve gotten another kid’s belongings to a new place and a new start. But just before parting ways and heading home, there’s always one more do-it-yourself project. That’s a misnomer for get-your-dad-to-do-it project. And according to par, Scotty came through the room saying, “A nail. One nail. My kingdom for a nail.”
Meanwhile, I’ve been sitting on the edge of the bathtub hammering this out on a laptop placed on a commode lid because there just isn’t quite enough furniture in the kid’s budget yet.
It’s funny how you get what you pray for, and it in no way resembles what you would have imagined, but it’s all right there in the blessings column. It conjures thoughts of one of the first moves in scripture.
“So Abram went as the Lord had told him … And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered … And they set out to go to the land of Canaan” (Genesis 12:4-5). It was about doing what God said to do. It was about blessings.
That’s what it’s still all about.
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