Moving Day

If you believe that Moving Day is the day you move from one place to another, you are only partially correct. The more complete meaning of the term is the first time in years any of your stuff has been moved.

I recently sold a condo, one so small that the instant you set something down, it stayed there. There was no other place to put it.

So on moving day I discovered the consequences of things remaining stationary for a decade. You not only find things you never thought were there but you find things you never thought could be there.

When my wife and I lifted the couch, we solved one of the greatest mystery of modern life: where the socks go.

You might expect to find missing socks snuggled behind a washer or dryer but laundry room socks only account for half the lost socks in the known universe. The other half, like dark matter, hides in unsuspected places – like under the couch.

We solved another mystery too, one that has plagued our marriage since the beginning. You see, whenever I nuke a bag of popcorn, my wife always demands a tax.

“Pour a little in a small bowl for me,” she says.

I always complain. I tell her it is unjust to suffer all the anticipation of a full bag of popcorn, only to surrender a sizable portion of it.

She says I exaggerate.

I insist I do not.

Now as we glance under the couch, we are both shocked to learn that the under-the-couch-tax is far greater than the one I pay her. It was humiliating.

But not all our moving Moving Day experiences were bad.

When I tilted my easy chair onto the two-wheeled cart, I discovered change, lots and lots of it. I found more silver than the Comstock Lode and a vein of copper, so rich and so deep it will revive the state’s mining industry for decades to come. There was so much change under there, I couldn’t understand how we kept afloat financially all these years.

Then there were the pencils.

Hundreds of them. Under everything. The odd thing is, we don’t use pencils. The last time I purchased a pencil was before the advent of the personal computer.

I suspect the cats.

I had seen them batting something around the hardwood floor but had no idea they had pencils or where the pencils came from. Perhaps the cats got them from the neighbors, but that cannot be – because our cats are inside cats.

So we piled everything into a rental truck and drove to Almost Iowa where we unloaded the couch, the easy chair and all the other stuff.

No sooner had I shuffled everything into place then my wife put a finger to her chin, tilted her head and thought a bit.

“Move the couch here and put the easy chair there”, she said.

So I pick up one edge of the couch and what did I find? A sock, a kernel of popcorn, a penny and a pencil laying under it.