I'm down to three weeks. Panic has not yet set in, but it's tendrils are creeping outward, into my consciousness. Soon I will act. The trick, in old age, is to know how much to move that process forward so as to leave me enough time. I have been packing things ahead of time. Things I don't need. (Yeah, I said that. I should take the same stuff and throw it away.) There is a couch to give away, and two more oak antiques to take to the consignment store. I'd like to take the china cabinet with me, but I doubt it would survive the move.
There are two nightstands to surreptitiously move to the dumpster area in the middle of some night. Possibly more there. There is a floor lamp whose time has run out.
The jury's still out on the mattress. Do I want it? If not, how to dispose of it. Theory: foam mattresses have gained in popularity only because it is impossible for one person to move a regular mattress by themselves. I dread even having to rotate mine. And why should I have to rotate it? It's not like it's a set of tires. Or is it? These are the kinds of questions that the regular mattresses elicit.
I'm excited about the move. I already know four people in Chico, and several more in nearby parts of California. I am planning road trips.
I should go now. This is the week I should start in earnest.
My great-great-grandfather is buried in Chico. You'd get along. He doesn't say much.
ReplyDeletePaternal side?
ReplyDeleteI hate the mattress issue, especially with a cat. I dismantle my bed regularly to vacuum underneath and it’s such a PITA. Soooo heavy!
ReplyDeleteNo, he was my mother's mother' mother's father. Which is odd since it was my mother's father's mother and father they ran off to be with in Chico when my mother was born. Mother's mother's mother didn't approve of the match, you see. So apparently I had family in Chico from both my mother's parents' sides. You might think that to be how they met, and it might have had something to do with it. But she was a college student at Berkeley and he a newspaperman in Oakland and they eloped to San Francisco. Now I want to know how my mother's parents met. Maybe their common ties to Chico, that little town way up at the far end of the Sacramento Northern Railway, started the conversation and sparked the romance.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, ol' Hazen W. Bartlett was a Down Easter, who came from Maine to start over in the Golden State, ran a water boat between Marin and SF for a while, but ended up working for his brothers in law up in Shasta County where they were lumbermen. They had a woodworking shop in Chico towards the end. He probably worked until he died.
Funny how that works sometimes, Don. I had an aunt and a couple of cousins who wound up in St. Charles, MO by way of Chicago and Redding, CA, and here I am,just the other end of the state, totally independent of them. And then there was Francesco De Gregorio who was from Naples, and married a Sicilian woman, my great-grandmother, for which the rest of his family disowned him, which just goes to show you we didn't invent family dysfunction in the mid-Twentieth century.
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