Although our main home continues for now to be Scotland, for
the past 9 and a half years we have maintained a house in Toledo, Ohio, as our
US base. In the meantime, our children
finished university in Cleveland and went on to other parts of the US, leaving
our old house as a kind of orphan.
About a year ago, however, we decided it was time to think
about getting rid of the Toledo house and moving our US base to Santa Cruz,
California. Since last April, we have made five trips to sort through
the possessions that we left behind when we moved to Scotland. We gave away at least half of our books and
all of our music CDs; we decommissioned 6 old computers and confidentially
shredded psychotherapy data sets; we persuaded our children to return to the
family home to sort through their boxes of old toys and school papers; and so on and so
on.
Two days ago, I arrived in Toledo from Scotland, with 13
hours of accumulated jet lag, having only two days before that flown back from
Singapore. There I joined Diane, who had
been here for a week doing final sorts and packing. We spent a very long day yesterday scouring
the house from top to bottom looking for things we’d missed (these were
numerous and sometimes surprising) and packing these up. We finished up about 9:30 pm.
This morning, 12 hours later, Bill Frizzell and his bearded
crew showed up to take the 100+ boxes and load them onto their enormous moving
van, which he parked like a supertanker on our little street in suburban
Toledo. Bill, who is driving our stuff to California along with 4 other loads,
turns out to also be a former music minister and an occasional country singer,
full of stories and at least one very nice song, which he pointed me to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4CiknL0Sjw . (Also, a song called "Shake
Your Head", which he said has been popular in Scotland, even Radio Clyde,
backed by his autistic nephew on drums and guitar.) He even stopped to help my
neighbor whose tire was almost flat.
From a European perspective, this might sound so
working-class middle America as to almost be cliche, except that it felt
wonderful. Somehow, I feel like our stuff, not particularly valuable but full
of memories precious to us, is in good hands.
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