Mary's Move

Back in the good ol' days of yore, obtaining the services of a local U-Haul truck involved a trip to the local U-Haul store, which was a building located on a major street with plenty of parking both for customers and for the vast army of vehicles available for rent.

Times have changed.

Now every Mom & Pop storefront can (apparently) be an FBO (Fixed-Base Operator) for the continental fleet of orange-and-white, so long as they have a parking spot and a key Drop Box hanging from an exterior wall (or a strong metal pole). Leases are arranged via phone apps. Keys can be picked up inside the stores behind the counter. For point-to-point rentals, it isn't even necessary that the final drop-off storefront be open at the time; simply follow the instructions on the phone app, take the appropriate number of pictures to verify mileage and condition, drop the key in the box, and you're golden.

I miss the old days.

After many months of searching, Mary found a new place to move which was a little bit closer to her new job and a great deal closer to her old home. The old place was a large apartment complex in a section of town where people sit around outside their apartments and smoke and leave toys and trash strewn around what passes for 'landscaping', where doors don't always work because they've been beaten on or spray-painted or in other ways heaped with abuse, where cars with battle damage roll in and out of the parking lot at all hours of the night playing loud music with thumping bass overtones, where maintenance people put patches over water-stained drywall and can't ever seem to find the right fix for the leaky water heater or the faulty air conditioner and come up with all kinds of excuses why they can't attend to your emergency needs at the moment but will be there as soon as they can -- which often turns out to be next week. It is a place which reeks of sweat and smoke and fried fish and moldy carpet and the hopelessness of people who know that they will spend the rest of their lives in dingy little apartments watching television or playing video games in darkened rooms and praying that this time the Lotto card they purchase from the corner store (along with their groceries) will launch them into a new reality where all their dreams will come true.

This time, Mary was the one who won the prize; we're not sure if all her dreams are finally coming true, but the one little hope -- that she would find a nice place to live -- was fulfilled when she found an available second-story rental only ten minutes away from us, in a cute little house which is close to shopping and the freeway that takes her down to work.

Saturday was Moving Day.

So on Saturday morning, we drove down to Battle Creek to obtain the Moving Van from a local convenience store (they'll let just about anyone operate a U-Haul franchise these days) and ran into our first obstacle. No, the truck was right where it was supposed to be, parked precariously in front of the store like a derelict barge on a rocky shore. But the blankets were wet and moldy. Apparently they had not been laundered since the last time they had been rented. And the young lady behind the counter, who had obviously had little (if any) experience with renting trucks, didn't understand the problem.

We had no time to discuss the matter. It was time to move!

It took quite a while to get things all packed up and boxed and taped and loaded into the truck. For some reason, we never seem to get everything boxed up before Moving Day. Probably because no one really has the time to spend organizing things when there are so many other things going on in life, like work and stuff. I left the organizing and boxing and taping to the girls, figuring my 'muscle' was better suited to lugging heavy boxes down the stairs and up into the back of the truck. The only difficulty was arranging all those oddly-shaped boxes into the most efficient sequence so as to maximize the load. Normally Cheryl takes care of that since she is the most efficient organizer in the family; but she was busy helping with the packing and boxing, so I had to attempt it on my own.

So it wasn't the most efficient truck packing, but it worked.

We ordered sandwiches for lunch and took a break to eat them around 1 o'clock. And then it was time for the final push to get everything loaded, which we accomplished some time around 2 pm.

After all that, we drove to the new place which was forty minutes up the road from her old place, but only ten minutes from our place. And we hauled all those boxes and pieces of furniture up the wooden stairs and through the tiny kitchen into the upper room which is now her domicile for the rest of the afternoon, right up until dinnertime. And spent a while doing a bit of de-organizing everything into the appropriate rooms.

Dinner was obtained at Wendy's, which we thankfully ate in her not-quite-so-new living room. And then it was time to let her settle into her space, so the rest of us dispersed to our own homes, feeling tired but satisfied after a hard day's work.

Of course, all the work wasn't completed. The truck needed to be turned in, and since we'd rented it for a one-way trip, we had to take it to a different facility. Which turned out to be a retail beverage store. Which was closed. And I wasn't quite sure what to do. But it was late, and I was tired, and the truck didn't need to be officially returned until the following day. So I left it in the parking lot of the retail facility and went home.

While home, I washed those nasty, wet, moldy blankets (had you forgotten about them?) and dried them and folded them because I couldn't leave them in the horrific state they were in.

Early the next morning, I went back to the parking lot (with my broom!) and swept out out the truck and placed the almost-clean-but-definitely-dry blankets inside and turned the key into the handy little kiosk (it was too early for the store to be open) and logged onto the U-Haul site to go through the painful process of taking pictures of everything (odometer, cargo area, etc.) and uploading them to the website and then downloading my receipt, and then, finally, it was all over.

Now Mary was in her new place, only minutes away, and we could move on with our lives.