Sometimes Things Move Slowly
Greetings, my darlings.
Everyone in my day to day life, and even those who aren’t, has been asking me lately, “How’s the moving going?” And well, the answer is it’s going fucking slowly.
A friend and former boss of mine, Slade, once told me that the only way to move is to do it all at once. Otherwise, it’s agonizing. It drags out. And then you basically never finish moving. You remain stuck in it for eternity, until you decide to move again. Or he said the first part. I added the last bit, since we’re being honest with each other.
Slade was right, for sure. But sometimes there’s no way to avoid a slow move. You can’t pack everything up and unload it all at once, because time won’t allow it. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and get through it.
There are a lot of things working against me here. The idea my parents and I had was that maybe we could spend some time after work and on weekdays tidying up and carting furniture and junk over to the new place, but that hasn’t really happened. We wake up late on Saturdays and Sundays (or I do at least – I think I deserve it!), drag our feet over to the new place, and get done what we can with the little time we’ve allotted ourselves. I load the dishwasher with my pots and pans, my mugs, my plates, in an effort to clean off all that sedentary grime. My dad lines the bathroom shelves. My mother unloads bins and decides what should go where. This past Sunday, I spent the afternoon cleaning my Pyrex bowls and more delicate glassware in the sink with my bare hands and a little bit of soap. It is slow, but it is progress.
Part of the slowness comes from the fact that I am living alone and I do not have all of the furniture I need. I sold much of the superfluous stuff, the stuff without sentimental value, when I left Wyoming. This is where the fun part comes in, but also where things begin to drag. In my parents’ house, I sleep in an old twin bed from when I was a child, barely big enough to hold me and my cat, Barry Hannah, who insists on tucking himself under my arm and chin when it’s time to hunker down for the night. When my mother asked me what I was thinking for a bed, I was adamant that we had to find something bigger, and if we didn’t start now, we’d never get around to it. For me it’s the stuff of nightmares, sleeping in a twin bed for another year. So we have to find a bed, we have to find a bed frame. We have to find a couch, and a dresser for my clothes. I suppose it could be as easy as going to IKEA (except no it’s not, because there is no IKEA in central Mississippi), but I don’t like IKEA. I like old things. Thankfully, so does my mother.
My mother has always been an antique fiend. Since I was a child, she’s had a booth (it has a cute French name with little price cards tied with ribbon, but we’ve always just called it “The Booth”) in one antique mall or another, for a time with her best friend from college, using it as a way to rotate out old furniture and junk her children or she has grown out of. The Booth, therefore, makes it much easier to find and pay for new-to-you old furniture and junk.
When my siblings and I were young, we hated The Booth and the agony we felt it brought upon us. Our mother would spend many a summer day antiquing, sometimes a weekend, dragging us children along because we couldn’t be left at home alone. This was long before smartphones were commonplace, and even if they had been, the Smith kids wouldn’t have had them anyway. So we tried not to fight and tried not to break things while our mother roamed the aisles of antique malls and junk stores. Often she would lose track of time, and then all of a sudden it would be three o’clock, and we kids would whine about how hungry we were because we hadn’t eaten lunch, and we would hear the dreaded refrain: “I guess we’ll just eat something now, and that will just be lunch and dinner.” One mid-afternoon meal to tide us over? No dinner to look forward to later? The horror.
As you can imagine, I was turned off of antiquing for years. I saw it as too much work with too little reward, too much time wasted when you could be doing more important things, like eating lunch.
I can’t tell you with certainty when the shift happened, but I can hazard a guess.
When I started college at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 2014, my mother, like many other mothers, took great pride in decorating my dorm room. It wasn’t anything extravagant or glamorous, but it was homey, with handmade curtains and re-covered headboards and a futon that looked modern and adult. In between the two beds, which my mother had put on risers for extra storage, was a piece she’d found at an antique shop. “I saw this, and I thought it looked like you,” she said. It was a record cabinet, painted a solid, shimmering gold. The two doors were glass paneled with large blue starbursts, and my mother had repainted the inside of the piece in the same deep blue. The doors were funny, with a strange locking mechanism that required you to push on the right door to let it pop out so you could pull it open, then hit the lever on the inside of the left door to open it as well. As freshman year came and went, and suddenly I found the roommate I had grown apart from gone and my bed stripped and my clothes packed up and a lease signed with two roommates I hoped would be my friends, I kept staring at the record cabinet I had only just started using for records. I knew there was no room for it in the small apartment I’d be sharing, but I asked my mother: “Don’t sell this one. Can you keep it for me, please?”
Nothing dramatic happened. I didn’t overnight become obsessed with mid-century modern furniture or begin prowling the flea market stalls like my mother. But this was the first time, I think, I discovered what my mother loved about antiquing. She had found something that was beautiful, something that no one else had, and she had cared for it to make it even more beautiful. Above all else, she had seen a piece and thought, “This looks like my daughter,” and the warmth of that phrase was like magic to me. You could find things that reminded you of other people. You could find things that reminded you of yourself.
Eventually, after that terrible year in that apartment complex, then a year in a sorority house, the record cabinet moved out of storage and with me to my first house in Oxford, then to my second, then across the country with me to Wyoming. Last week, it settled into the apartment in Jackson. She’s full to the brim with records now, and on top of her sits an actual, serious record player (a Christmas gift from an ex-boyfriend many years ago), and my dad’s own receiver from the 70s. I look forward to friends coming over while I make stew or spaghetti in the kitchen, asking them to pick a record, yelling into the living room about how the locking mechanism works.
I type this in my new apartment, sitting on a twin bed in what will be my office and a guest room, but where I am currently sleeping. There still is no couch. There still is no full sized mattress. My clothes still sit in plastic bins, and my books are shoved to the back of a closet. Much of me is restless, anxious, but part of me also doesn’t mind the slowness of it all. I think it’s worth it to take time, to wait a little longer. After all, what’s the fun in something being finished if it doesn’t feel like me, if when I wake up here in the morning, I am not reminded of myself?