Carolina signoff: Notes on loading day

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 31, 2021

Around two hours after this item posts, I will return my house keys to my landlord’s office and begin driving north. This will close out 17 and a half years of living in North Carolina, including roughly 13 years and three months in Durham and a little less than a decade at my soon-to-be-former rental house.

I will miss Durham. It’s a small- to medium-sized city with a lot to recommend itself. No, Durham’s arts and entertainment scene isn’t the biggest, but it’s there if you care to look for it. Yes, Durham has rough edges and communities afflicted by poverty, much of it the legacy of national and regional racism. Then again, what city in this country isn’t troubled at least a bit by financial deprivation and the repercussions of prejudice?

Back in 2019, however, I realized that there were things I wanted to do that could more easily be accomplished by living elsewhere. That I’m only now leaving Durham speaks to a bit of foot-dragging on my part, a great deal of it engendered by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has made the prospect of spending time around other people somewhat unnerving.

I don’t yet have another place to live — at least, not one of my own. I’ll be moving back in with my Parental Unit for what I expect and hope will be just a few months.

I find moving to be extremely stressful. It requires all of one’s possessions to be packed up or disposed of somehow. Over the past few months, I’ve fitfully recycled a number of old papers, some but not all after scanning them into my computer or verifying that they had already been saved digitally.

In the final days before the movers came, on Saturday, Aug. 28, I accelerated the process, dumping most of my financial papers from 2013 through 2017. I actually kept some stuff from 2012 because I found it late in the process and wasn’t sure whether it was on my computer or not and didn’t have the time to check carefully and — deep breath — didn’t have time to do anything about it if the papers hadn’t already been preserved.

(Do these kinds of things need to be archived on a storage device somewhere? No, probably not. But I’m paranoid about losing items or information that will in retrospect turn out to be vital.)

I would like to say that this was a better-organized move than any of my last three — from New York to Henderson in January 2004, from Henderson to Durham in June 2008, from my first house in Durham to my second house in the Bull City in October 2011. But I’m not sure. Because not all of my old documents were in binders…

I also had plenty of papers in cardboard magazine files, or not contained anywhere at all. I got rid of some of those, but not nearly enough. I tried to bring myself to dispose of papers from graduate school, with little success. In the end, plenty of it got packed in boxes. I hope that when I open them up, I feel capable of sorting the contents promptly, rather than letting them linger.

I have a big box of mementos that I collected in the first decade or so of this century that I shuttled from my first North Carolina homes to my second place in Durham. I barely opened up that box in nearly a decade of living at my current place. It’s past time that those mementos are weeded out.

Maybe I’ll dump the majority of those items, taking pictures of the ones that spark memories and keeping a handful that really bring back good times (or maybe just important times). That would be great.

I didn’t sleep the night before the movers came. I worked from about 8 p.m. Friday until around 6:30 a.m. Saturday to finish packing. When the contents of the house were more or less ready to be loaded into a truck, I drove to the nearby motel room that I’d rented, washed my face, and lay down in bed.

Oscar called from the moving company at 8:26 and told me they were on my way to my place. I blearily told him that I’d be right there. I climbed out of bed, got dressed, brushed my teeth and drove five minutes back to my house.

There was still a bit of organizing to do — things to put in the recycling or trash bins, for instance, which I don’t do in the middle of the night out of respect for my neighbors. (There are dogs in a neighboring yard that bark wildly at noises.)

So I did those things and other stuff as well. I found a few more items to pack. I pottered around the house, occasionally checking the time. The movers didn’t show. Eventually, I began to worry that they’d come by my house five minutes after calling me, waited five minutes and then left without attempting to contact me again.

At 9:18, I dialed Oscar’s cell number to check. Right as I put the call through, I heard a truck engine. I looked out my kitchen window to see a truck with the blue livery of the moving ‪firm and it‘s affiliated company. (I won’t name corporate names in this post, but you can often see one or more of the firm’s trucks on the north side of Interstate 85 if you drive the highway through Durham between the Guess Road and North Duke Street exits.) I canceled the call.

I said hello to Oscar and showed him around the house. I was wearing a mask. He and his colleague, a woman whose name I was not given and did not hear, and whom I only heard speaking and spoken to in Spanish, did not wear masks. I told Oscar that everything in the residence should go into the truck except most of the stuff in the bathroom, most of the stuff in the kitchen and a sprawling pile of boxes and packing material in the north end of the living room.

While the movers backed the truck near my front door, I rearranged stuff slightly. I took a shelving unit that I’d stashed out of the way in the bathtub and put it in a room that was going to be cleared out. I also shifted the one box that was to be taken from the kitchen into the front room that forms the house’s dining area and living room. That made things simpler: Everything in the bathroom and the kitchen — including the kitchen’s refrigerator, stove and oven, and washer-dryer combo — was staying, while pretty much the rest of the house should be packed up.

Oscar and his associate got to work. I stood around in the kitchen, out of the way. Sometimes I looked out the window. Sometimes I looked at my phone. Sometimes I looked into the house’s adjoining dining and entertainment area. Sometimes I just stood there and fidgeted. Sometimes I pottered about with things in the kitchen.

I grew increasingly uncomfortable. I’m not good at standing, and even sitting can be a challenge. I have suffered from poor posture all my life. It’s an issue that I would like to address over the coming year.

My parent sent me a text at 9:59 a.m., one of the short messages she typically sends me mornings and evenings over the past several years: “Happy moving day.” 

I was caught in the grip of warring emotions: Relief, sadness, anxiety. I’d been preparing for this move for months, and I’d geared up for it with increasing intensity over the past two weeks. “It’s happening now,” I replied. “I didn’t sleep last night. I am standing around as the movers work. Lots of feelings.”

I spend a little time outside. But there was nowhere outside for me to sit in private, and by this point all the standing around I’d done made additional standing feel awkward. Also, it was hot. The temperature was around 82 degrees Fahrenheit when the movers came, and it climbed steadily until a little before 2 p.m., when it reached 94 and stayed there for the next two hours.

Back in 2014 or 2015, I bought a restored bicycle from the Durham Bike Co-Op. Unfortunately, I was never really comfortable with it, and I may not have ridden it more than once or twice. It had been sitting in my backyard for years, but I moved it to the side yard several days ago as a reminder to deal with it.

The chain was rusted. The rear wheel was missing. The front wheel was present, but only because it was attached to the frame with a bicycle lock. The combination from the lock, unfortunately, was something that I’d long ago forgotten.

Also, the lock was rusted enough that the combination lock’s dial was working properly. I’d sprayed it with lubricant a few days previously, but even so I couldn’t turn the numbers properly. After fiddling with this for a few minutes, and getting bitten by mosquitos, I retreated to the safety of the indoors.

I keep a New York Giants camping chair in the trunk of my car. It doesn’t get used much, but that changed on Saturday. I brought it into the kitchen, and after a while I settled into it. I discovered that the right armrest kept sliding down, always lower than I wanted. The cause of this eluded me.

My phone is nearly four years old, and the battery is in terrible shape. I stayed close to my charger, which was plugged into an outlet by the stove. It was problematic to sit and keep the phone plugged in.

I took a few photos as the house emptied out. It would have been fascinating to capture as a time-lapse video. You start with three full rooms, and after a minute or so of sped-up video, they’re empty. I’m always captivated by these kinds of films.

In reality, the process took about seven hours. There wasn’t much for me to do. Once in a while, I boxed up a few more things to be moved. If Oscar asked me a question — does this go? — I answered it. We chatted a little bit about New York City and Durham.

But most of the time, I just sat in the kitchen and looked at my phone.

Toward the end of the process, my lack of sleep caught up with me. I sat in the chair for short stretches with my eyes closed. But I’m very particular about how I sleep, and my chances of dozing off in that kind of pose are virtually nill.

Anyway, I did a walk-through of the house around 4:15 and then signed some papers. The movers wrapped things up and were on their way around 4:30. Later, I would realize that I had neglected to box up two sets of over-the-door hooks that I’d overlooked in both my packing frenzy and my end-of-loading walk-through.

I was exhausted, but I still had stuff to do. I drove over to one of Durham’s treasured institutions, the Scrap Exchange, to donate several different items. They included an expensive never-used food mixer, a Pyrex pie mold, an ironing board, some metal shelving, some plastic serving trays, a rug and a whole bunch of less exciting stuff.

As I dropped off my items, I wondered if I’d ever visit the Scrap Exchange again.

Then I went back to the house and had some food, my first since dawn. I did some cleaning and organizing at house for around an hour and a half before placing an order at a nearby Thai restaurant that I’d never patronized. After hopping in the shower and changing clothes, I got in the car, picked up my food (it was fine — not great) and retreated to my hotel room.

It was a long and rather exhausting day.