“Moving”

No one truly enjoys it, that is unless you’re doing it for a living and/or moving on up like the Jefferson’s.

My family moved a lot throughout my childhood…and no it wasn’t because we were military brats…it was normally because we were either being evicted, running from the law and/or just plain old out stayed our welcome. We moved so often that we become professionals…we could move a full-size house in no time flat…like as if the cops were after us…and in most cases they were.

We had the speed aspect down, but as far as being organized, well that was another story altogether. The majority of the time the packing all took place the night before and you were lucky if you saw a box, mostly everything was packed in big black garbage bags and/or pillow cases…and sometimes even in other pieces of furniture such as the microwave and/or dressers.

My mother (aka the foreman) would always be standing off to the side barking orders and criticizing what the workers were doing; things would be strapped to car roofs by means of duct tape and/or extension cords and all the while we were all yelling at each other for no other reason than that they were holding a beer instead of a box…just another move in the life of a white-trash family.

Our moves were never “on up”…ours were normally either back to start (like in the game of Sorry) or even in some cases, worse off than when we started. I can recall many times where we went from a house like the Brady's to a shack like the Bundy's and everything in-between.

We even had a few short stints on beaches and in parking lots too…we used to joke about who got the master bedroom (aka the dumpster out back). Our many moves have brought us to some very interesting places across the country, like Pennsylvania, Iowa and Florida for example…and if you’ve ever been to any of these places I don’t need to tell you that as a young kid it was a little bit of a culture shock…the people just aren’t the same from one state to the next.

Thankfully as we got older and moved on from the cuckoo's nest the moving subsided…we actually started establishing roots...and no I don’t mean the kind that show in your hair when you wait too long in-between dye jobs.

MJM