The title of this post, Moving Pictures, is kind of a play on words.
My mom passed away a little over a year ago, and we have been slowly and intermittently dealing with her “stuff”. We had downsized her quite a bit before she moved in with us several years before, but the number of our possessions, like space, is ever expanding.
Earlier this week I was helping my son load some of her furniture into the truck to take in for donation. I found the two stickers in the photo on the back of one of her dressers.
I guess you never know when a stream of thought is going to transform into a flood of memory.
A little background
My father was in the military, and we moved around quite a bit when I was young. Luckily, most of the moves happened when I was very young, so they weren’t as disruptive for me as they could have been. Most of my clearest early memories begin when I was around 5 years old. We were living in Newport, Oregon and I was in kindergarten. Right at the end of the school year, my dad was transferred to a new ship, so we had to move to Seattle. Just days before the move, I took it upon myself to adopt a stray alley cat. I named him George, and he might have been the worst pet cat ever. My parents were furious when I dragged poor George out to the car and announced that he was going to Seattle with us!
I started elementary school in Seattle, made friends, and went about my childhood existence. Two and a half years later, dad announced another transfer. This time we were moving all the way across the country – to Baltimore, Maryland!
We piled the whole family into our new two-door Pinto Runabout; Mom, dad, my sister, and me. And George. We drove south to Death Valley, and east all the way across the US (Probably on Route 66/I-40). George *hated* riding in the car, and made sure that all of us knew it. Dad was annoyed because he had to stop all the time to “walk” poor George, and because he had to find motels who allowed pets. Mom was annoyed because dad was annoyed, and because the car didn’t have air conditioning. My sister was annoyed because she was an eight-year-old girl, and because her little brother was bored, and sitting six inches away from her, eight hours a day, for five days. And I was annoyed because everyone else was annoyed. And I was bored. And I was too short to see out the windows.
George expressed his displeasure by escaping from the car in a parking lot somewhere near Knoxville. And then hid up under the hood of a car. Precisely *which* car was up for some debate, and was resolved by dad opening the hoods of several nearby cars and looking for him while mom worried that he was going to get beat up or arrested before we could get back on the road. George was pretty quiet for the rest of the trip. I think he knew.
Being resilient, like kids tend to be, we fell into routine in Baltimore. New schools, new friends. George passed away after a couple of years, and it was met with some small relief since he had developed a habit of peeing on whatever was directly behind him at the moment that you made eye contact with him.
It was kind of fun to be of an age where I was old enough, or at least aware enough, to appreciate the history that we were surrounded with. We had school field trips to places that my friends back home would only ever read about in books.
Big changes
Baltimore lasted about two and a half years also, and then mom and dad came to us with *two* big announcements –
- Dad had been transferred again, this time to Alaska! and
- *We* weren’t going to Alaska because mom and dad were getting divorced!
In truth, this also came at a good time in my development. I was old enough to understand the facts that were presented, but not old enough to understand the impact it would have on my life. They came up with a fairly complicated solution that involved dad moving all of us to Seattle, and then him taking his things and continuing to Alaska.
We moved two more times by the time I graduated from high school, both for my mom’s job. She finally settled in a house that she lived in for 35 years, until she moved in with my family seven years ago.
And?
Those two stickers? The ones in the picture? I found those this week, stuck to the back of her dresser. The blue one, on the left is from American Red Ball moving company. They stuck it on there when they moved us to Maryland in 1973. The white one, from King Van Lines was stuck over the top of the blue one – from the movers who took our stuff from Baltimore to Seattle in 1976.
I’m pretty sure that my dad bought that bedroom set for my mom in 1972. That blue sticker was put on in 1973 as the dresser was hauled all the way across the country. The white sticker went on in 1976 for the trip back. We lived in Seattle for 2.5 years before we did a U-haul move to Vancouver, WA. We lived there for 2 years, and did a pickup truck move to Longview, WA. Mom moved twice more before she settled down for good in in Longview, and then a few years ago we finally moved her into our house.
So that dresser is 48 or 49 years old and has been moved to at least 8 different houses. I have been looking at that furniture for a year now, trying to decide what to do with it. I finally realized that I don’t really feel a connection to it, and we don’t need the extra storage, so it will be going to Goodwill. I hope it can share its stories with its next family in some way.
But I am keeping the stickers.
I think that George would approve.
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