August 1, 2012

the hardest part was the piano

We are, at last, unloaded.
Not unpacked. Nooo, not even close. The sunroom is so full of things that I had forgotten we owned. Boxes that have been labeled and relabeled over multiple moves to the point that I'm not sure what is in them. So crammed with things we have lived, (mostly) happily without for a year. Which means that a lot of it is stuff that we want to keep, but that we don't actually use on a daily basis. I took the lid off of one bin today, just one. It had tiny blue jumpers, a big straw hat that a two year old Briton wore for Easter pictures, a pair of bitty rain boots, the ones he wore every day for a year. The first sweater I ever knit was in there too. That sweater was the garment that caused me to swear off knitting for good, until it found me again (and thank goodness too).
The hardest part, was the piano. Predictably. We have never had a piano before, have never had room for one. But the day before we left to retrieve our things from Charlottesville I came up with the brilliant plan to find a free piano on Craigslist and bring it home, we'd have a moving truck, after all. And it was brilliant. We got a great piano, with a bench, in not too shabby condition (although there are plans to spruce it up, aren't there always?) Except we also got a truck that was TWICE as big as we needed which, never mind the enormous amount of gas it guzzled or the fact that it really didn't go faster than 40 miles per hour which turned that the 12 hour drive into 17, did not fit into our driveway in a way that made moving a piano off of a very high truck and up three steps onto a porch and into the house very easy. I hurt to my fingertips. And I didn't even do the hardest lifting.
But the truck is empty, waiting to be returned in the morning. We are unloaded, which is half the battle. I'm not sure if it was the easy half or not, but at least it's half.

No matter what I say, my friends, never, EVER let me move again. Ever.