Packing and Moving

Packing and Moving

It never stops.

In the 45 years Linda and I have been married, we have moved about 15 times. We’ve moved across town and across the state and across the country. We have moved to Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, and Virginia, our present home.

Since we moved to Virginia ten years ago to be close to our daughter Lillian, we have lived in 3 different houses and two different cities. There were even times when my wife Linda moved to one state and I moved to another because of job demands.

When I tell people about all these movies, they always seem surprised.

What surprises me is that they seem surprised. The statistics I’ve looked at suggest that 15 moves isn’t that different from what most Americans do. The average American, according to a study conducted by the US Census Bureau, moves 11.7 times in his lifetime.

And when they move, they move a lot of stuff.

I read an article recently in Time Magazine about how the average American household has about 8,000 pounds of stuff.

My wife and I probably have more, and it’s all my fault. I’m a book collector. You pick up a book, and it feels light, unless it’s something like Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy, but that lightness disappears when you have a box of books. That box will weigh about 40 pounds, and I typically move with about 135 boxes of books. That probably comes to about 5,400 pounds, 2 and a half tons. But that’s just me. Most people will have other stuff that weighs them down.

They will pack and move their 8,000 or 10,000 pounds 11.7 times and wonder, as I do, what the point of moving is. Do we move to get a better job, a better view, a better set of neighbors, a better living room, a better school district, or do we move because moving is fixed solid in our DNA? Or does it go back even further and deeper in our collective history?

Maybe people like you and me have been nomads ever since God threw us out of the Garden of Eden and told us to take a hike.

PS. Before I end this, I better tell you I’m not the one in the family who does most of the heavy lifting and packing. It’s my wife Linda who does it. She packs up her stuff and my stuff (all those books!), boxes it all and preps it for each and every move. She’s the moving engine, and I’m the caboose.

It all reminds me of a story my mom told about the time we moved from the refugee camps in Germany to America. She said when she asked my dad in the refugee camp to help her pack to come to America, he took a little drink of vodka and bundled all the clothes together in a bedspread like America was just across the street.

I think I inherited some of my dad’s foolishness when it comes to moving. I start packing a box up, and I end up typing at the computer–just like this.

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This is my most recent column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish paper in America.

Feel free to stop by the website linked below and drop a comment. It makes the editor think I'm not just slouching.

http://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/guzlowski/przeprowadzka-packing-moving/