Home is Where You Throw Your Dirty Clothes on the Floor

The boxes are (mostly) unpacked, the pictures are hung, and my husband’s dirty clothes are discarded all over the floor.  We are home.

It has not been an easy past two weeks.

I never actually questioned our marriage during this whole process, but I did vaguely wonder at a few points if someday I would have to place my hand on a bible in front of 12 of my peers and explain exactly how my fingerprints ended up on the murder weapon, and no your honor, I can’t account for my whereabouts that night because I was in some sort of moving induced fugue state. 

I kid, I kid.  Mostly.

I think it’s safe to say that we are on the other side of it now, though.  The only casualties were my husband’s cell phone and about a box of glassware.  And a bookcase.  And an armoire.  Okay, and maybe a bit of my sanity (hence the busted cell phone).

Those losses aside, I did come out of the move with a new appreciation for everything that we have.  Both literally and figuratively.

Seeing everything* you own sitting in a truck is a sobering experience.  Your entire life crammed into one small space like that makes you realize how much you really have… and how it’s way too god damned much.

I vow that before the next move that I am going to get rid of at least half of our crap, maybe even more.  But I can’t think about any of that right now or I will either die of a massive brain explosion or have to start researching defense attorneys. 

And now, if we can, I’d like to take a moment to talk about how #blessed I am.  I am going to do a friends and family brag real quick.

I know most people can’t utter these words with a straight face, but I love my in-laws.  Love them.  They are literally some of the best people out there.  My husband asked them to help us move and they said yes with no reservations, even though my father-in-law was just days home from the hospital and my mother in law was recovering from a back injury.  Yet there they were, unloading box after box of crap, I mean of our precious possessions, off of the truck.  And my sister in law and her fiancé and my husband’s aunt, uncle, and cousins, I really couldn’t have asked for better help (they even stayed and helped me unpack the kitchen, LOVE THEM).  My cousin who had to work at the last minute swung by with beer, water, and snacks (LOVE HER).  And our friends gave up a Saturday morning, that I think most of them would have rather spent in bed sleeping off a hangover, to sweat it out carrying a literally shit ton of, well, our shit.

Like I said, #blessed.

It’s been hard saying goodbye to our home and trying to get settled here.  Although I lived here when I was younger, it still feels new.  The noises are new; the way the refrigerator hums, the sound of my grandmother’s oxygen concentrator at 3AM, the weird screams that come out of the woods in the middle of the night (yeah, that’s as terrifying as it sounds).  It’s all new and different but soon it will all be part of the background, part of our new normal.

So here I sit, in my new living room, in front of my new TV, with my same old daughter, about to start a load of laundry and get this show on the road.  This place may not feel quite like home yet, but my husband’s socks are on the floor, and that’s a start.

*Apparently our house was some sort of structural turducken with stuff crammed inside of stuff crammed inside of stuff.  Even though we “moved out” on Saturday we were still finding random things back at the house as late as yesterday while we were there to do the final cleaning.