My family and I recently moved to Virginia Beach. It is, according to my calculation, the 13th time we’ve moved since my wife and I were married 20 years ago and the 20th time I’ve moved in my 43 years.
We’ve moved for a variety of reasons and in almost every way—by air, land, and sea. We’ve rented both U-Haul and Penske trucks—from a short 12-footer to a 26-foot Freightliner with attached trailer—for drives across town and across the Southeast. We’ve moved by boat, shipping our affairs internationally three times. One time, when our lease was up in a neighborhood we liked, we rented the house across the street and simply carried everything over by foot. When we moved from Connecticut to North Carolina and found we couldn’t afford to rent a truck, we sold all of our second-hand furniture and shipped the few items we wanted to keep by UPS.
I wish I could say I’ve learned something profound about moving, but carrying banana boxes of books down slippery stairs or driving an overloaded truck with hot brakes down a mountain doesn’t exactly put one in a philosophic state of mind. Seneca is probably right when he tells Lucilius that we travel because we think a change of place will change us for the better. It doesn’t. “Though you may cross vast spaces of sea,” he writes, “your faults will follow you whithersoever you travel.” Moving usually adds a few.
What I have learned is that most practical moving advice is, at best, only partially right. BuzzFeed posted an article a few years ago offering “33 Moving Tips That Will Make Your Life So Much Easier.” This is the first mistake: believing that you can do anything to make moving easier or that there is such a thing as a “smooth move.” There’s not.
Sure, you could “pack an overnight bag containing all the essentials” so that you have them “within easy access” after the move, but you also have to find it when your house is littered with half-opened boxes. Leave it at your old place, and you’re toast. That’s why I like to diversify my essentials across containers. You may not be able to find your toothbrush, but at least there’s toilet paper and deodorant.
You can label your boxes, use a color code, and give a map of your new house to people helping you so they know where to put things—all to save time. Just be sure to ignore how much time these preparations took and all the misplaced boxes.
Put your screws in sandwich bags and label those, too. I have. But don’t be surprised if you’re still somehow a screw short. We’ve moved our current kitchen table six times and have lost a screw almost every time. Thankfully, it still works and the creaking adds charm.
No matter how small a box you use for books, it will always feel too heavy. Buy bubble wrap, put your wine bottles in socks, and tie everything down in the truck. But if you really don’t want anything broken, don’t move.
This isn’t to say that everything that can go wrong will. That’s also false. Most things actually go according to plan in a move. But something always does go wrong—usually when you least expect it and when you are so tired that you are unable to handle it with anything like a “proper perspective.” I didn’t seriously consider abandoning my family after I jackknifed the car trailer in our driveway just a few months ago, but I did think about shooting our dog when she wouldn’t stop barking at the truck.
And if you are moving yourself, expect, too, that there will be a point when you feel you are unable to continue, realizing, of course, in the same instant that there’s no turning back. My wife told me it’s a little like giving birth. You reach a moment when the only thing you want to do is magically turn back the clock and become unpregnant, and the only thing you can do is push.
I’ve never seen an article about how to have the “perfect” birth, though I’m sure they exist. Most women know better, I’m guessing. Labor is first about not losing—not losing the baby, not losing too much blood—and managing the pain before it is about welcoming a new life into the world.
Maybe moving is also about not losing—not losing too many screws and too much perspective. And once you’re done and settled in your new home with your family around you, happy and healthy, you’ll slowly forget how painful the whole thing was and think: I wonder what it’s like to live in Antigua.
