Moving

Moving Tip: Don't move in winter.
No matter if you live in a normally mild climate, bear in mind that Murphy's Law and Mother Nature are more likely to conspire to wreak havoc on a moving day in December than one in June.

Never have we seen snow in France like we have these past few weeks.


Particularly the last three days, which have been like living in a perpetual snow globe. It's nothing of the Michigan winters we're used to (or used to be used to), but here in France we're not equipped for six inches of snow. We don't have convoys of salt trucks and plows that come through at four in the morning to clean everything off, we don't sell bags of road salt at the grocery stores, and we don't have all season tires.

Luckily we don't have to worry about commuting to work this week, but we did have to cancel one "last" dinner with friends and arrived a few hours late to another.

We woke up today to another swirling snowstorm. Our movers were scheduled to arrive between 3 and 4 in the afternoon, and at 11 I gave them a call.

"Oh, I dunno..." they told me. "this snow is a mess. We'll call you later."

So we carried on with our day. My colleague Alejandro came over to buy our little C2, and David went through the paperwork with him. Alex looked at me warily across the table while I clutched a coffee cup and watched the snow fall.

"Are you ok?" he asked. "You look really stressed."

Apparently my attempts at coming off as breezy and relaxed were in vain. Was it really so obvious? Maybe Alex is just used to seeing me with makeup?

At 3:30 I called the movers again. I didn't mind if they delayed to the next morning - I just wanted an answer.

"We're busy" they answered. "We'll call you back soon."

At 5:30 I was emailing my mom and stressing out about ever seeing these movers - would we have to delay our flight? Would one of us have to stay behind? Could we charge the moving company with the cost of changing our tickets? - when the phone rang. It was the movers, and they were coming around in half an hour.

Before I even hung up the phone David had kicked into Tasmanian devil mode. He started unplugging the computer, wrapping up wires, and questioning everything that belonged to me in the room.

"What is this thing? Do you want to keep it? Can I throw it out?"

I turned to the refrigerator and started tossing jars into a nearby trash can. Gourmet mustard, capers, tapenade, out out out.

When the movers arrived they parked their truck on the sidewalk across the street and came in to look around. They were only two, one of them Portuguese who spoke just about everything but French.

Then they started bringing in packing material and I noticed the text on the boxes was in German. David confirmed that he had hired a German company for the move. Portuguese movers German boxes. and What a waste of all the clever French moving vocabulary I had accumulated in the past four years!

Over the last week David and I have had time to fill the fifteen boxes that the moving company sent in advance. We had a well organized, well labeled fort of boxes in the spare bedroom, ready to go. The movers pretty much told us to get out of the way and did the rest of the apartment in about two hours. The apartment was filled with the sounds of screeching tape guns and thudding cardboard boxes.


We locked Oliver into the bathroom and holed ourselves up in the bedroom, nervously chatting to pass the time. Once in a while we wandered around watching them work. I noticed that they labelled everything in English, whereas the boxes I had labelled were a mix of French and English. Surely anyone who saw our shipment to the US would have no idea where we'd come from.

Finally at 9:30 they were loading the last of our boxes into the back of their truck. David signed off on the paperwork while I ran down to the pizza restaurant below our apartment. I waved goodbye to them from the front window.

The pizza shop gave us plates and silverware and we ate in the nearly empty apartment while the cat stretched his legs in the new open space.





Just one more day.



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