We’ve started packing again. Since 2001 I’ve moved 9 times. Looking back it seems as crazy as it was annoying at the time. But I became a serial bargainer- I’d wait until the last two weeks of fall moving season and pick up great deals. Then my lease would be up after a year and the landlord would find some sucker to pay full price and kick me out. My friends would dread when I called them in September because it meant another round of hauling my furniture up and down stairs.
Sometimes I got bored apartment hunting and moved into such awful places that I had to flee as soon as the lease was up. My oldest brother still talks with sadness and stunned confusion about helping me move into an “efficiency apartment” that was not much larger than the 500,000 pound TV he carried up the stairs because I hadn’t noticed there was an elevator down the hall. Once I met Tom and moved into our first not potential-for-horror-film-set apartment, we started getting movers and honing our apartment finding skills. I mean we hired someone to do it for us, of course.
Maybe this will be our last move out of an apartment in Chicago. Likely we’ll eventually figure out a way to live in a house other than one owned by our parents, and in a few years I’ll get one of those Google cars so we can go out drinking and have the car drive the baby sitter home.
So the clock is ticking…two more weeks and then we’ll have one of those huge life changes that takes about ten days to get used to. On the eleventh day you can barely remember how it was before.
