Elation From a Job Well Done

Today I moved a large sewing room and another room full of boxes and some other miscellaneous stuff out of my husband's house, as he was evicted without prior warning to me [I live separately in a townhouse.] I brought my daughter, picked up a 10 foot U-Haul truck, and we drove to Eatonville. There was supposed to be a crew to help us, paid for by the previous owner, but they never showed up. Fortunately I had already secured my three sewing machines and my most important tools when I came down to make arrangements to pick up my things.

I bagged fabric and Pearl boxed up tools and notions and patterns, and the new owners asked their adult children to help move some of the most important furniture. I was fortunate to locate two stashes of my Queen Bess silverware, a wok, and so forth, and pick up a down comforter, a bedspread I made many years ago, and one of my old prayer books with personal notes and prayers written in, which I found upstairs on the third floor. A lot of other items were impossible to locate, however, as the new owners have boxed most things up and it's not possible to get to everything.

I brought down two flights of stairs eight very large terra cotta "bricks" and 4 large shelving "boards" for a "bricks and boards" book case system I've been moving around for years, which were on the third floor. By this time my quadricepts were like jelly. Then I brought down the boxes, loaded up a carpet which I had hand-finished the edges of when I set up the sewing room, and did the final clearing out. The entire job took five hours. The last time I had to disassemble a sewing room it took months and a paid professional to help me sort out the miscellaneous minutia.

We finally drove home, completely exhausted, to face the task of unloading the truck and my car, this time with only the two of us. I fetched items from the truck while Pearl stacked them up neatly in the garage, then the two of us figured out how to unload a large particle board shelving system, and an extremely heavy cabinet which folds out to create a 6 by 4 foot work surface of the correct height. We unloaded the entire truck, plus my CRV, all by ourselves, and nothing was broken, including us.

No more parking in the garage until I get my sewing room set up at my townhouse. Sniff. A good motivator.

We had to stop at a gas station for both vehicles on the way back to U Haul, and were separated when Pearl behind me turned into a gas station and I didn't. So I got the rig turned around on Meridian and came back for her, gassed up and returned the U Haul after the office was closed.

Then we went for a well-deserved, healthy but delicious Indian dinner, and back home for a hot shower, with a sense of elation for all we accomplished.

In one of Baha'u'llah's Writings He points out that we ought not to pride ourselves on our possessions, because we may own them today, but tomorrow, others will own them. There is nothing like an eviction to reinforce that lesson.