LET'S TALK: Moving in mid-age is a tough experience

I still wonder about the mental state of those folks who move every year or so and seem to always be able to shrug it off without so much as breaking a good sweat.

Yes, we are facing another move, a midmonth maneuver scheduled to happen this week. It will be our fourth since the loss of a home in 2006, which computes to a move every four to five years. The last move was forced on us due to gentrification of an area assimilated by the Borg we know as the River Market District. Resistance was futile. But the new management company offered a chance to relocate to another building it managed at the time ... a rambler near where the Governor's Mansion Historic District meets the South Main District.

You can guess the rest. South Main, or SoMa, has also become a hot spot for people who entered professions that are better-paying than ours. Our building was sold to fixer-uppers who are transforming the dumpy empty units to much more tony ones. The owners have been kind, and we had not been asked to leave so that they could renovate our apartment. But we didn't want to stick around and try their patience.

At any rate, as I found the last time we moved: Moving gets tougher with age.

Mainly, it's the stuff. Think about older homeowners who pass away and the decades of belongings they leave behind. As was the case with the possessions left behind by my recently deceased father and stepmother, an estate sale has to be held if there's any hope of clearing out the house. Now think about a pair of reluctantly nomadic middle-agers, moving from apartment to apartment while trying to hang on to their doilies and plastic furniture covers and creepy dolls in crocheted outfits and cheap, dust-encrusted ceramic figurines and decades' worth of Fingerhut catalogs.

OK, we may not have those things exactly. With us, again, it's the books. It'll always be the books, along with music CDs. Again, we gave away a ton of them. Again, we have about 50,000 of them left that hubby, especially, can't bear to part with. With me, it's the crystal and china pieces, some of which I inherited from Mom.

There's a bit of an upside when it comes to everything else. There are also quite a few major things we thought we couldn't do without but are now jettisoning. Our new landlady, who has more than her own share of possessions, said she'd cut us a deal if we didn't ask her to move all her stuff out of what had been intended as a second home to accommodate a frequent commute that didn't come to pass. That request helped us in our decision to ditch furniture pieces we once regarded as antique-ish but now simply regard as tired-ish, shabby-ish and make-the-Property-Brothers-and-Chip-and-Joanna-recoil-in-horror-ish. Who needs a massive cocktail table when the doggone thing more often than not ends up being a huge catch-all for mail, other messy papers and food crumbs?

Meanwhile, we look forward to taking advantage of our landlady's chic leather sofa after owning only a deteriorating, Gorilla-taped, slipcovered loveseat; her modest, but sleek chest of drawers after dealing with a giant, Duncan Phyfe-style chest that has become an eyesore over the years; her queen-size bed, after our headboardless/footboardless wonder whose frame wasn't property reassembled by the unexpectedly expensive moving company we used last time.

Our downsizing is enabling a regression to the days of youthful, college-dorm moving, a la U-Haul and a good friend and neighbor who'll be paid partly in furnishings and home accent pieces. Pizza too, if he wants.

The new place will have amenities we're unused to or at least haven't had in a dog's age: an elevator, which will be most welcome as even living on the second floor of a walk-up was wearing our old behinds out. A washer and dryer only a few steps and across the hall from our front door, rather than down a flight of steep basements stairs. A pool, about which I'm especially happy as we know people with pools but can't seem to get ourselves invited to one during the summer. A balcony that overlooks a heckuva a view, complete with some great sunsets. And yea, a dishwasher.

But -- unnnngh! -- we just have to make it through the process.

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hwilliams@arkansasonline.com

Style on 09/08/2019

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