Movin' It

On Saturday, a tag-team of relatives watched the kids for an entire twenty-four hours while Ben and I unpacked at the San Anselmo house. We don't officially live there yet, not until next week, but on Friday night, he and I slept in our bedroom for the first time in almost a year.

I wrote in here a while back that moments you greatly anticipate are rarely the way you imagine. This was an exception. Laying there on an old twin mattress, Ben beside me on another, bedded down under layers of homemade quilts, gazing at the stars through the skylight, the windows open to the sound of the wind rustling in all those trees (side note: My great friend, Evany, also a Marin native, once confessed that she's afraid of San Anselmo because of all those trees. Tree phobia, look it up). That moment was just as sweet as I thought it would be. Coming home, being home, after pining for it so deeply and for so long, what's better than that?

All day Saturday we hauled box after box up the two flights of stairs. It struck me that moving is like childbirth. The pain just goes on and on, it's exhausting, it's overwhelming, it's sweaty, every moment is a trial but you look at the clock and three hours have gone by like three minutes. Both acts create huge change. And you probably lose the same amount of weight engaged in either activity. With birth, once you've dropped the baby, placenta and those seemingly gallons of fluid, you're a good fifteen pounds lighter (though with my fifty pound weight gain with each baby - yes, ladies and gentlemen, five-oh - the fifteen pound jump-start wasn't that much of a help). With moving, between the repetitive stair climbing, box lifting and forgetting to eat (probably the only time that happens to me), I think I've stumbled on a fabulous diet.

As I was climbing the stairs yet again, hoisting an impressive two boxes, I called to Ben down at the U-Haul, "I'm going to have such a nice ass by the end of this move." He countered that I should go down to the local gym and recruit some of those ripped trophy wives (Marin is ripe with the aggressively fit). I could call myself a personal trainer and charge them a mere hundred bucks a head for the work-out. Like Tom Sawyer and his whitewashed fence.