We finished this past weekend. Moving all our stuff took about half again as much time and money as I’d first expected, and of course now there are boxes everywhere needing to be unpacked, and my back is sore, and my new bookcases still haven’t arrived, and there are still a number of two-prong outlets I need to convert to three-prong for the computer equipment, and on and on. But we are done.

Now that I don’t have any remaining need to make the best of it, I’ve been admitting to myself how much I disliked our previous place. Too small for us and our stuff, not much storage space, a tiny yard that the landlord never did get his damn leftover metal pipes out of the back corner of, a leak in the living room roof that the landlord never did repair even after it shorted out the lighting, old appliances that would conk out and be replaced thanks to our thrifty landlord by used replacements that were smaller and older than the ones before. We were forced to move by an owner move-in shortly after my brain surgery, when we had no money and I was still somewhat disabled; friends took up a fund to pay for our move-in, and we took that house not because we liked it better than the place we were leaving but because it seemed like the best we could do with our very limited funds.

The new house is half a duplex. The rooms are about 10% bigger than the old house, and there’s more closet space, and there’s a garage. We’ve already filled the garage with utility shelving and boxes of books and records, plus whatever else we don’t want to deal with quite yet. But the records and a lot of the books will stay there. And I look around sometimes when I’m in the garage and boggle at the idea that we lived with all this stuff in the house with us, in a house that was smaller than the place we’ve moved into.