My husband James and I have moved a combined 50+ times. I don’t have an exact number, because we keep remembering moves we forgot…and not all moves are created equal – swapping apartments in your 20s, when everything (or nearly everything) you own fits in your car, is very different from moving a whole family of four with a whole house full of stuff 😒. My personal count includes two moves while I was under the age of three, which I don’t remember; one where my mother shipped us off to our grandparents and we returned to completely different home (which was stressful in an entirely different way than being actively involved in a move, but I digress); and a couple of easy apartment moves – but not moving in and out of dorms in college (I mean, that’s not really moving, is it?). James and I have been together for 21 years, and have moved 22 times together, including one where we swapped houses with the neighbors (we had to move into a third location for a couple of days so the other people could move into our house, basically two moves in one, yay 🎉) and another where we had to move because our lease was up, but I was in the running for a job in another state, so we ended up moving again 6 weeks later. We have moved a LOT. We’re not professional movers in the sense of getting paid to move other people, but I kinda feel like we’re pros at this 🤣

So moving is nothing new to us, but our most recent move is unlike anything we have ever done before. We have moved into my aunt’s house in a small village in upstate NY. It is a beautiful house. A 5600 square foot Victorian, built in the 1860s. Three stories plus a full basement: seven bedrooms, one full and two half-baths, three parlors, three pantries, a library, servants’ quarters, a wrap-around porch…I could go on. It’s a great house. It is not in great shape, however.

The house has been at least a little and sometimes a lot neglected for the last fifteen or more years. It began when my uncle’s health deteriorated due to Parkinson’s disease. Naturally during those years, my aunt’s focus was on taking care of him, and things around the house took a bit of a backseat. After my uncle’s death, grief largely kept my aunt away from the house. She stayed with friends, eventually living nearly full-time with her partner in a neighboring town. During the time my aunt was frequently away, a friend stayed in the house – a contractor with expertise in painting, drywall, and carpentry. While he lived here, he painted the house and did a fair bit of work repairing ceilings and general maintenance. He also struggled with depression and addiction, and did not always do enough maintenance or even basic cleaning. When we first came here in early July, the kitchen and bathrooms had not been properly cleaned in at least a year, and most of the house and its (many) contents likewise had a year and more worth of dust, dirt, and whatever collects on un-cleaned things over time.

My aunt is a collector, famously of dolls and teapots, of which she has hundreds (of each), but of many other things as well – glass paperweights, books, sewing machines, dishes…so many dishes. Need a

samovar? We have a dozen 🙃☕. There is a lot of stuff in the house. Cool, interesting, and often valuable stuff. Additionally, my aunt is a woman with a big heart and a big house, and she has often helped people, including my own immediate family, by letting them live in the house. These people have sometimes left behind their own stuff, and/or gone through Cindy’s stuff, leaving things disordered and not always taken care of, and genuinely multiplying the mess.

I hope you are beginning to see the picture that I am painting…this is a huge, gorgeous house–full of stuff, disorganized and filthy 🤢. When we decided to move here at the beginning of this summer, there was not a single room for my family to move into.         

When I was a kid back in the nineteen hundreds, before all these new-fangled handheld electronic games, we had analog handheld games. One of these, which I mostly associate with my childhood dentist office, is the slide-puzzle. You remember those…they had a picture, sometimes letters or numbers, on small square tiles fixed into a frame with one square missing. You had to slide the tiles

around one at a time until they were in the correct order. During one of our early moves together, James and I were moving one pile of stuff into an empty spot to get an empty place to move something else into, and I had visceral de-ja-vu of doing slide puzzles 😶‍🌫️. I did not know what they were called (I did some internet sleuthing to find the picture for this blog, thereby learning the correct title), so I described it to him as a ‘tile -game’. Ever since then, it has been a running joke between us, especially when we move. Any time one of us expresses frustration with having to move things just to get to other things, we’ll say something to the effect of “tile-gaming, it, baby!”  

This project that we are taking on is the tile game on steroids 🫠. We’re not moving single objects or even piles, but piles of piles, even whole rooms. The move was a grueling two-month long project, driving back and forth between here and our home in New Hampshire, carving out space to live in here while organizing, packing, and majorly down-sizing our own things. Now that we are officially moved in, we are slowing down, settling in, and proceeding as if eating an elephant…but that’s a blog for another day.