family matters

For whatever reason, my family moves a lot. It wasn't always so - I had only two childhood homes, but ever since there's been a lot of packing and unpacking. Curiously I never seem to get better at it. Just less likely to cry when things go wrong. Let's see, there was the time we had to hoist a sofa three storeys up the side of a house in a February ice storm (it still didn't fit). A mover who loaded my every possession in his grubby van and then held it all ransom until I ponied up an additional $500. Even DIY didn't work out: a reasonably sized 16-foot cube van substituted with something only slightly smaller than a tractor trailer. A tractor trailer that stalled every quarter mile. Oy.

So of course it was predestined that I should lose car keys (twice) and a cat (both eventually found) and get a flat tire while moving my mother yesterday. You see, as much as we'll do anything for our kids, kids will do anything for their parents too. And so it was with our motley group - my sixty-something mother, her seventy-something helper friend, my always cheerful husband, his goth-punk-with-a-heart-of-gold cousin and a now-sunburned-because-of-the-flat-tire me - more or less uncomplainingly relocated my mom from an old Victorian with no air con but lots of stairs, to a deluxe retirement condo with a koi pond and happy hour on the patio.

That I was tear-free and we were all sipping margheritas and snacking on nachos by 5:00 p.m. makes the day a tremendous success. That I was locked out of the house with Henry until 10:00 p.m. doesn't technically count against the move, so I hereby pronounce the Morell Moving Curse dead.