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Thursday, March 07, 2013

The Move

We're just a week out from the big move and are still completely given over to sorting things, discarding things, packing things like mad. As a student it seemed as though I was moving myself or helping friends move several times a year, and though it was always somewhat traumatic it was the trauma of a few days even when I was the one moving. It's been a decade since my own last move and all the advanced arrangements, the patient ticking off of checklists, devoting time every day for nearly a month still hasn't been enough. I think we've cast off at least a third of our furniture, books, gizmos, clothes, and whatnot -- gifting, yard-selling, having rubble piles of decayed dismaying dismantled crap hauled off -- and still the boxes, of especially books, number in the hundreds. The rooms of our house now echo with eerie emptiness, our cat is like a war refugee, saucer-eyed with permanent shock, the place is coming to feel to us as alien as an unwelcoming motel. Our regular jobs are still here, relentlessly making their demands, but work seems to unfold in some minor key, almost in a dreamworld, and all that is real are these walls of stacked boxes, the shriek of packing tape torn from its spool, and everywhere disturbed continents of gray dust pouring out behind shelves and out from under heavy furniture, swarming up to sting your eyes and nose like nanobotic bees (there, despite everything, a futurological image).

1 comment:

jimf said...

> . . .everywhere disturbed continents of gray dust pouring
> out behind shelves and out from under heavy furniture,
> swarming up to sting your eyes and nose like nanobotic bees
> (there, despite everything, a futurological image).

Dust nanobot:
http://www.automotionstudios.com/images/dustmite.jpg