We moved often during our marriage.  One move, we used a small rental truck and jammed all that we could into it from the house.  I reached up and pulled the back hatch of the truck down.  I felt success as a relatively novice mover.  However, the door had six inches to go before being fully closed because something or many things were in the way.  My husband came by me to ask me why I was crying.  “The darned door won’t close.”

“Oh!” he said.  He smiled and opened the back hatch and brought it down with all of his superior male strength.  Still,  it was six inches away from being closed.  I looked at the rear of the rented adventure in moving truck and saw something sticking out under the door.  I walked over and yanked on it.  The bag of “something” came out and the door came down all by itself.  That something was a 29 cent bag of green Easter grass.

We then turned around to look at the house and garage.  We had not packed a thing from the garage:  freezer, lawn equipment, snow shovels, various rusted tools, and miscellaneous. My husband raced to the rental store to rent a trailer to attach to the truck to move the stuff from the garage.  While he was gone I walked around the truck and saw that a large nail was in one tire.  I went to the unpacked garage and found a hammer.  I used the claw end to pull out the nail from the tire, novice mover that I was.

When I did that I heard I snake like hiss. Air was escaping the tire from the nail hole.  I put the nail back in the hole and hammered it back in.  The hissing stopped.  I started to cry once again.  My husband came home with the trailer hitched to the car.  I got the look from him, “Why are you crying now?”  I gave him the “What was I thinking when I married you?” look.

Young then, we had the energy but not the temperament to load the garage stuff into the trailer.  We did that the next day and set out on our move.  I drove the car with our cat wrapped around the back of my neck screeching in terror.  I followed the truck.  Once we reached the outskirts of the city it began to rain.  The cat dug her nails into my neck and the tone of her screeching went up a notch to unbearable levels of noise.

I saw my husband’s turn signal go on.  It was not our exit.  I turned mine on, rolled down the window, and in pelting rain gave him a hand signal that could be interpreted as “What the heck?”  He cranked the truck window down and stretched out his arm to insure that I follow this new direction.  I did.  The rain was biblical.  The trailer fishtailed on the exit.

We were on the west side of the city.  I grew up on the east side.  I chewed my lip and tried to see the back end of the rental truck.  The cat was causing blood to trickle down my neck and I tried to pry her off of me with one hand.  I finally did and she disappeared under the car seat which would cause us further grief later on in the day.  We arrived at my parents’ house and the sun came out.  We were back on the east side, and we unloaded all we owned into their clean and empty garage.  They had a summer home on a lake up north.

It became hot and steamy and the cat was nowhere to be seen or heard in the car.  I was more flexible then, and found her wound around the mechanism of the passenger side car seat.  An hour later, we were both scratched and angry.  The cat shot into the door of the house and disappeared again.  We both had similar dark thoughts.

Some years later, with four kids and two cats we made a move in the late afternoon with a large rental truck that dragged a car on a flatbed trailer.  It began to rain as we traveled toward New York City, which was vaguely familiar.  I had the kids in a large van.  Using maps we got onto the Tappan Zee Bridge somehow, and then onto a toll road.  It seemed like a victory.  We had made it on the very first leg of our journey to Florida!  The rain increased and it was hard to see.

The kids were bouncing up and down and the cats were under the car seats.  It was totally dark and I tried to follow the road signs, having given up on the map and my husband’s navigation.  We had two way radios on this move.  After an hour I saw a road sign that indicated that we were sixty miles from Albany.  That rang a bell.  I got on the radio and said, “We are going North on this road, didn’t you read the sign?  ALBANY is North.  We are moving South!”

I loved this.  I was right!  Well, he turned his freight train of a moving machine onto one of those police car turnarounds.  This is illegal, and I followed him.  His vehicle could not make the complete turn, and with oncoming cars he backed up and hit the front end of my van and got his monstrosity going towards Florida.  I followed closely, knowing that we were going to be arrested at the toll booth.  He handed the woman his toll ticket and I did the same…getting out of the car.  Somewhere guns were drawn.

Hormones, tears, children, yowling cats, and a hysterical me assisted in us getting moved on down the road towards Florida.  We felt good about ourselves until we got into Brooklyn somehow and then skirted New York City to continue on to an exit.  All were soaking wet, and all used the bathrooms except for the cats, who used the rug in the back of the van.  We picked out horrible snacks and then I saw that after being terrorized for several hours on our journey I was looking at souvenir Statues of Liberty!  The kids wanted one and I nudged it onto the counter by the cheese puffs.  Then we headed South and when we did get to Florida in August it was monsoon season, and the temperature was 111 degrees.  I was orange from cheese puffs, and as angry as the rattlesnake coiled by the front porch.