A Day at the Races

Our Race

Exactly four days later, Roger and I were frantically runnin’ around the house trying pack. There was a moving van taking up most of the residential street and Roger and I had been packing like crazy people for the past week. Why I didn’t call my parents and get the names of some people who would do this for Roger and I was beyond me. All of the big furniture was loaded and carefully packed. Now, we were working on the boxes. I was very grateful because John and Veronica had left the baby with Veronica’s mother and had agreed to help us. I felt badly in asking Mary and Freddie, I truly felt they needed the time to themselves and not be in the middle of this mayhem that was called moving.

 Brian and Chrissie were on a sort of Honeymoon…well, if you can call it that. I had called it the ‘sex with room service’ and Chrissie had given me one of those looks that she always gave me when I said something to make her miserably blush yet at the same time was quite truthful. They had only taken off for three days with no true plans…like I said…sex with room service.

 Roger and I were already dreadfully exhausted and just knew it was going to hit us all at once when we sat down in the car. We had been up since 5:30 that morning and we had to be out of the house by 6:00 that evening…out for the new folks moving into the place Roger and I had called home for nearly six years. There had been a few times this morning when Roger and I had to take a moment and realize that what we were moving into was much better than where we had been.

 We hadn’t had a chance to eat today because we had been so very busy with attempting to maintain a schedule. Thankfully, John and Veronica made us take a time out at 9:35 for cream filled donuts and coffee while leaning up against the side of their car. I can’t think of a better way to have taken a break that morning. We did exactly that and watched as the movers as they loaded up six years of our life into the back of a moving van. It was now 5:00 in the evening and we had exactly one hour to get the remainder of our stuff out. Thank god we didn’t have to clean the place once we got the rest of the boxes loaded. Not that Roger and I were messy, but it would have taken another two hours to clean. The moving van was about three-fourths of the way full…not bad progress for a near twelve-hour day. John and Roger were carrying our full-length mirror to the van while Veronica and I sifted through a closet.

 “My god, Lydia! I don’t know who has more clothes! You or Roger!” she laughed as she zipped a garment bag….okay, barely zipped a garment bag. It was so very full we could hardly finish zipping it at the top and it had gotten quite heavy. “Do you realize that I’ve packed up forty-seven pair of heels!” Forty-seven, Lydia! I have four pair of shoes total!

 “Hey, I’ve had some of those shoes for a while!” I smiled at Veronica, knowing good and well I had myself a bit of a shoe fetish. “Besides…Roger likes me in heels.” I winked at her. Veronica laughed stupidly.

 “Hell, he’d like you in socks!” she said, piling another load of clothes onto the floor where our bed once sat. She sighed. “You still have such beautiful clothes. They always smell so nice. Like cigarettes and…some kind of expensive perfume.” I laughed at her.

 “Veronica, everything Roger and I own is mixed with the smell of cigarettes.” I reached to the top shelf of the closet and pulled out another garment bag for the pile of clothes on the floor. There were at least four more bags worth of clothes. I was beginning to think Veronica was right….my god, we had a lot! As I stood there with bag in hand, I immediately counted eight blazers and twelve other shirts that were Roger’s. We hadn’t even gotten to the trousers yet. “I’m going to throw this garment bag down to you. I know there’s one more up here somewhere. I stood on the balls of my feet only to see the other garment bag underneath a box. “I thought we had all the boxes out? What the hell is this?” I asked, mostly to myself. I reached up for it, barely making contact with the side and pulling it down. I sent it spilling all over the floor.