For those of you who are wondering, I am moving (with my family for the people who asked) from Boston back to the city I grew up in located in southwestern New Hampshire. Part one of this epic narrative can be found here.

It is a sunny Sunday morning. The packed boxes are threatening a coup d’etat. The sun is shining. That’s it! It’s time for a road trip, a moving experience, time to find out my true “haul age.” Time to hang my arm out the window and feel the skin crisping as I get a cab driver tan. It resembles a farmer tan, all up one arm, stopping abruptly at the T-sleeve line, but only on the “driver’s side” of your body. Sunscreen? Yes, that was a great idea that I got when we arrived at the midway filling station. Yes, it’s a filling station. You fill the car’s tank with gasoline and your own with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

I spent maybe a half hour loading the car with my husband. He’s the master of optimizing the packing space. Remember my advice last time to label all the boxes? You can see that with this move I’m actually trying. That orange box is full of breakable glass plates and bowls and if you peer closely, you might be able to see the bubble wrap they’re packed in. Then with my daughter as co-pilot, off we went.

The reasons we move are many, varied according to who you ask. I love living in Boston. There’s so much to do and see. But that’s one of its drawbacks as well. The small city we’re moving to doesn’t have as many museums, although it does have several. It doesn’t have as many institutions of higher learning, but three colleges are located there. No public transportation system exists but it does have roads filled with vistas that can take your breath away.

And it has my house situated in a large yard filled with grass, ferns and fruit trees. Right now there are plums galore, pears, apples, crab apples and quinces growing and ripening. There are blackberries so warm and juicy that they seem to dissolve into a pool of flavor when they’re put on your tongue. Birds of all colors and descriptions fly in and out, their songs a medley of rejoicing. Black bears live in the woods near this house. Deer do as well.

Nature is a wonderful thing but one of the best reasons for going home again is my grandson who is nearly two. He’s a funny little boy who loves his mom and dad and is learning that his Grammy’s not so bad either. He runs around the yard with wild abandon, a smile on his face and a song on his lips. Already a lover of music, he has learned to sit at the piano and plays it. Not hammering the keys with his fists like some children would do, but plunking out notes one at a time with his fingers.

His ideas on unpacking are a bit unorthodox. He takes items out of the box and places them straight into the trash bin. Come to think of it, maybe he has come up with a genius solution to finding places for all this stuff.

While he “helped” my daughter with unpacking, she found a jar of bubble solution, unscrewed the top, and blew a long string of bubbles toward him. His reaction was immediate, loud and enthusiastic: “Woah! Bubbles!”

That alone is worth packing every one of these boxes.

Text and Photos Copyright © 2009  CoyoteOldStyle and her daughter.
All Rights Reserved.