Motus Mentis

Mission accomplished: we completed the move.

It was a marathon on Thursday. The movers came at 7:30 a.m., loading the truck as Nina and I scrambled to make the place presentable for a final walk-through with the buyers at 1:30. We got on the road for Massachusetts about 2, with a plan to get to a storage unit in Bourne to drop some of the bigger items before getting to the house in Wellfleet in the early evening — only to find that all of Route 95 from NYC through to eastern Connecticut was clogged in bumper-to-bumper traffic. By the time we got to the CubeSmart in Bourne it was almost ten, and when we got there the elevator we needed wasn’t working. It took a while to sort that out, and so by the time we got to our house with our three-man crew it was well after midnight.

At this point we confronted the next problem: our house is on a narrow dirt road, overhung by trees, and we have a steep, curved driveway going up to our little hilltop. We’d been worried all along that the gigantic 1600-cubic-foot box-truck they’d us sent might have trouble with this, and so it did.

First we tried backing in, while the truck shattered the stillness of the wee hours with a beeping sound that must have awakened households from Truro to Eastham. This approach was too difficult in the darkness, though, and so our driver decided to pull back out to the road, turn around, and go up forward. After breaking off a few tree-limbs, he completed the ascent. (The team, by the way, had to be back in New York — 300 miles away — for another job at 8 a.m.)

For the next hour-and-a-half or so the four of us humped boxes into the basement. The crew — Damir, Lazar, and Enrique (three fine young men of superhuman strength, stamina, and spirit, two from Montenegro and one from Mexico) — at first urged me not to risk my aged sinews by lugging book-filled boxes, but as the hour latened and their deadline approached, they were glad to have me join in.

Finally, at 2 a.m. or so, the truck was empty. We’d hoped to be able to turn it around and drive out forward, but there wasn’t enough room, so it had to go down the hill in reverse — meaning another deafening round of God-damned beeping, which at this point, I was convinced, could be heard from low Earth orbit. But the driver, with remarkable skill (and guidance bellowed in Montenegrin from the roadway behind) did manage to get the truck all the way backed out without incident (except for, at the very last moment, snapping off one of my neighbor’s fence-posts).

And so it was done. Having not really slept for two days (and having spent the previous days and weeks in continuous physical labor getting ready for the move), I collapsed in utter exhaustion, while our indefatigable troika of young gods piled back into the truck and headed back to Gotham for another day on the job. (If you ever need to move, by the way — and after this I pray to God that you don’t — I highly recommend that you call these guys. They really were amazing. Five stars.)

Thank you all for your supportive comments and emails. I’ll get back to normal activities here once I’ve caught up on some sleep and my skeleton stops aching.