Moving, or The Ninth Ring of Hell
by Mary Leonard

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

— Albert Einstein

When I was in grad school, I moved from a dorm room to a furnished apartment. It took one carload for my books and clothes. The woman who drove me gave me a radio, my only other possession. I felt very focused and in balance. Forty years later, the preparation for moving from a house to a condo required an elaborate process of triage and months of garage sales and frequent trips to consignment shops, -charities, and the city dump.

The complexity of the decisionmaking process was up there at CEO level, but with no pay and accompanied by the feeling that I was about to fall off a cliff. What to give away and where and to whom became physically and emotionally exhausting. Near the end of our packing, my husband and I became ruthless. My husband looked at a cut glass decanter we had received as a wedding gift, noticed the wine residue at the bottom and said, "We will never get this clean," and tossed it. No nostalgia: notes from students, old letters from friends who were writers, postcards, trinkets from foreign adventures, lectures from grants, workshops, stuffed animals, yearbooks — tossed over my head. I couldn't even give things to my children: one child lives in 750 square feet in Brooklyn and the other in a tiny cottage on a moshav in Israel.

The last few weeks before the move was the seventh ring of hell: 95 degrees, and my husband was home alone packing and sorting and I was teaching adolescents at Simon's Rock College in Great Barrington. He would call me every hour and I would run to the top of the college hill, the only place with cell phone connection, and call him back.

"Where are you?"

"I'm teaching."

"I can't do this alone, we'll never be finished in time, and I'm working from morning to night. What are you doing?"

"I'm teaching!"

I could not go home at night because of the long daily commitment of the program and so I had the privilege of relaxing in my own three-bedroom student house that was not air-conditioned and where the stovetop aluminum foil, not cleaned since the 1970s, attracted nightly visits from a family of mice. The third floor, where I slept, had fewer mice but was also the hottest, the only palliative a large whirling fan so loud it seemed I was traveling inside a jet engine.

When I returned home finally to my surly husband, I found out he had every reason to be surly. We had descended to the ninth ring of hell. We only had two weeks left to clean out the house, the garage, and attic before the closing. I was reenacting the myth of Sisyphus: move a mountain of stuff out of the living room one day, and the next morning another mountain had taken its place. We rented a Hertz truck; my son and daughter-in-law came up to move all the boxes and then noticed that the floors in our new loft were not finished. Could this be true? The condo was new. Many phone calls later, we heard the clash of stories: Of course they were polyurethaned, the contractor said. No, someone put on linseed oil, the realtor said. They were waxed, the cleaning woman said. Madly, I called floor people but we were closing on Tuesday and this was Saturday and then leaving — oh did I mention this? A week after we moved, we would need to fly to Israel for our daughter's wedding. I finally found the saint of all floors who said, "I'm going to solve this." He called around and found the right product and agreed to move all the furniture out while we were gone, and fix the floors. I blocked out the closing day, just a whirl of offices and signings with no one offering water or coffee even though hundreds of thousands of dollars were passing hands.

The actual move went smoothly but what was I thinking when I planned the living room? Too much furniture even for a loft space! And my old couch was very worn and now its back showed and so had to be moved to the curb of our old house — it was gone before morning. My husband and I moved the living room furniture at least ten times and then just plopped down and said, "This is why rich people have designers." We managed to fit in the rug from ebay, and arranged the meager furniture, but somehow the cocoa butter walls had turned pink overnight and suddenly the living room was not only too small but the wrong color. How do those samples mislead?

My husband and I spent the next month carrying boxes from one end of the loft the other, wondering whatever happened to the wine opener, and to the folder marked House. Meanwhile, I had time to look at the details of our design statement. My god, the color was suppose to be a creamy beige and who said, don't paint the moldings and trim white? I was faced with a large space that looked like a face coated with pancake makeup: no eyes, mouth or eyebrows. The artist upstairs said, "Wait until you put your paintings up. Just try these pillows and the rust throw." The illusion worked for about five minutes and now I am looking on line for sofas and have hired painters to do the woodwork white. My husband keeps asking, "Can't we just live with this for a while? You did a great job." But I am a visual thinker, can't even relax until the newspapers are straightened.

I know, we both sound like spoiled old Americans and of course we are, but we have traveled and slept in unusual places. On our recent Israeli archaeological volunteer dig, we were on the top floor of a dorm with no air-conditioning in the Negev Desert. We did try to leave our windows open a bit when we left for the dig, but would come home to pigeons roosting in our beds. One swooped up my gold circle earring and placed it along with other circled detritus and scraps and left us a well-formed egg. It was beautiful. We placed it gently outside on the windowsill in hope the mother would return. She did.

And so we move on, boats against the current. Oh no, that's the ending for The Great Gatsby. My husband and I have moved on, after 34 years in the same house, not into the past but into the future. Anyone know a good place to buy a new sofa, cheap?