From Sea to Sea, Part I

Monday, June 24

It’s absolutely inevitable that the last few hours of packing up a house will be absolute chaos.  I started packing many weeks before our move, I gave away extra food from the freezer, I had us all living in half-empty bedrooms.  I thought I could outrun the chaos.  For the day of the move, I hired some teens to help me clean, so as I finished emptying each room, they came along behind me and gave the room a hearty wipe down.  As we worked, my kids delivered every item I handed them to either Jon who was getting ready to pack the van, or to the garage, where we were storing all the stuff we didn’t need.  We blitzed just about the whole house this way, and I was feeling quite proud of myself.  As I sent the teens on their way, Jon and I and our kids sat on the couch to put our feet up.  We ate a snack.  We had to eat a large snack, because I still had a lot of snacks in the house.  Since I hadn’t wanted my bulk-sized cream cheese and whipping cream to go to waste, I had made little cheesecakes a day or two beforehand.  Many little cheescakes.  With plum sauce to go on top since I didn’t want my plums to go to waste.  (We had picked those plums ourselves last summer!)  And since I didn’t want my pears to go to waste (peeled, sliced and frozen by myself and my mother in law!), I had made a pear crisp the night before.  A really big pear crisp.  With fourteen cups of pears.  And so we had a large snack, sitting there in our mostly empty house, feeling quite on top of things. Jon said that he thought we were right on target, time-wise, since our new tenant was planning to arrive at 11 am.  I said that yes, I only needed to empty out the fridge yet, and then the house was done.  We ate our snack and then I headed to the kitchen.  There was a fair bit of food in the fridge yet. Hmmm.  Quite a bit.  I put together a box of ingredients for Aidan to deliver to the neighbour – a free grocery delivery!  Aidan returned with the box untouched.  Our neighbours didn’t want it.  Didn’t want it?  Who in their right mind turns down a box of veggies and half a carton of whipping cream?  Oh, it HURT me to pour that whipping cream down the drain.  Sheesh.  I ended up trying to pack all our extra food into our traveling cooler.  The tenant arrived, and I was still scrambling to arrange the food and clean the fridge.   The kids were hyper, there was a continuous trail of half empty condiments in the door of the fridge that I couldn’t leave behind, the tenant was wandering through the house talking details with Jon.  Anxiety was settling in!  Jon sent the kids to the bathroom for one last visit and it was time to go!  I still had my head in the fridge trying to clean off some rotten red pepper scum from the crisper drawer.  Our tenant came into the kitchen, and I smiled.  Jon came into the kitchen.  We all looked at the piles of food I had sitting out.  Jon just starting carrying all the piles out to the van, no questions asked.  I climbed in to the front seat and he packed the food around me: two coolers and one box of food at my feet.  And a 9X13 glass pan resting on my lap, still half full of pear crisp.  And this is how we drove out of town, with 3,000 miles ahead of us!   Surrounded by leftovers, barely able to move.