today

Today I moved furniture all day.

I moved desks, lamps, books, bookcases, cords, couch and chairs, tables. . .Merry helped. And I moved a piano all by myself! Huzzah for me!

This tendency to move furniture on a regular basis runs in my family--apparently my grandmother was a regular rearranger. Perhaps it's the gypsy blood; now that we're finally settled somewhere, I at least have to play at moving.

I've done heavy furniture moving even while 8 months pregnant, under some sort of spell that drove me ever forward, around corners--bend those knees!--and up and down stairs. I started as a child--an old letter to my grandmother from Kenya promises her pictures of my new room arrangement as soon as I got it perfect, and a diagram is eventually attached to one of my missives. I moved furniture around in college even though my roommate, who was very mathy, told me my vision was faulty. But she grudgingly took an end of the bunk bed and we went at it for a couple hours until I realized that she was right. And then we put everything back exactly as it had been before we started and went to sleep. That was my one terrible failure at furniture moving. Since then I've done much better.

I think Merry's caught the bug, because when I mentioned a possible new arrangement for the downstairs rooms, she lit up like a firefly and got that crazy gleam in her eyes. She knows what's fun, my oldest daughter. I usually wait until Martin is out of the house, since the moving stresses him out (he didn't move much as a child--like our blind dog we had as a child he likes to memorize where things are), but the kids are pretty used to it now. Bea did glue herself to my hip for a little while there right after nap--she awakened at a bad time, when the couch was still on its end and the sun room was impassible. So we finished moving the couch into place with Bea holding onto my torso like a little monkey.

Martin came home from sitting all day in the sun at graduation, took one look around, and said, "I guess I should never get used to anything." As if he didn't know that already!