Growing Up in Tahoe
Twenty-one years in one house is a long time. It’s enough time for babies to be born, grow up, and become women in college. Time for careers to come and go and new ones to flourish and grow. Time to know everything there is to know about a wonderful neighborhood. Then it was time to move. It was only a few miles away, but it’s a whole new world.
While I loved my years at the edge of the wilderness in Ward Canyon, we decided it was time to trade the no-speed Internet, wood-only heat, heavy snow, and the long drive for a place with none of those things. Why didn’t anyone tell us that downsizing wasn’t necessarily simplifying? I am sure there must be some sort of mathematical formula that explains the relationship between how long it has been since you moved and the difficulty of moving. Where did all this stuff come from, where has it been for the last 20 years, and can I go back in time and have the money back that I spent on it?
When escrow closed it was time to do a little minor remodeling. We found out that minor remodeling is similar to being a little bit pregnant. Once you head down that road there is no turning back. We also discovered that ‘remodel’ is defined as: opening up a case of worm cans with a side of whupass. When we had the heater inspected the contractor shut it down, declaring it unsafe. It was November, so we knew that coldness was a possibility, but no worries, we have the woodstove. So we got the woodstove guy to take a look at a hopefully minor problem with the damper and he notes that the pipe is much too close to the wood mantle and it could cause a fire… so we need to get a special double-insulated pipe and we shouldn’t use it because the house could burn down. Actually, the house is over 20 years old, the mantle looks just fine, and the woodstove has been used on a regular basis — but they are Covering their Assets and I’m paranoid of impending disaster so we had to get it fixed.
Aside from heat, there was replacing the worn out floors with tile and new carpet, electrical repairs, painting, stop and drain valves, and on and on while we continued to move load after load of stuff. Soon the garage and storage room above it were stuffed with all the crapola that we didn’t have the guts to throw away. Every day, we dumped another Subaru-sized load and got a brief feeling of accomplishment, quickly followed by the disappointment of the humongous task still ahead.
After a while, the moving process begins to feel like a long flight after a wonderful vacation. At first you are sad to be leaving where you were, with fond memories of how much fun you had, but then as time goes on, you are exhausted and all you want to do is get home and put this long, strange trip behind you.
Then all of a sudden the North American Van Lines truck arrived to move the big stuff. What a difference a professional makes.
Stuff was flying out of there and in just two hours the old house was nearly empty and in another two hours the new house looked like a place that people actually lived in. We wandered around the house all happy-go-lucky, marveling at the joys it presented, then hunched our shoulders and drove our piddly little vehicles up to the old house to confront what was now a hygienic disaster area. Where beds and couches had stood for two decades, a several-inch layer of grayish material covered the floor. I am not sure, but I thought I saw it move. And there were still more piles of stuff to be dealt with. In the deepest, darkest recesses of those piles, we did find a few ancient gems, such as my baseball card collection and a long-lost photo album of my college days.
At the tail end of our November snow extravaganza, with the move almost complete, we headed to the airport for a Thanksgiving trip. We noticed that the door to the storage room above the garage was open. A quick look showed pieces of granola bar sitting half consumed on the carpet. Our haphazard mess of a storage room had apparently turned into squirrel Shangri-la… was he still here or had he flown the coop? With all this junk, who knew? We didn’t have time to worry about it, just headed out the door and hoped for the best. Kind of like the process of moving.
~Tim Hauserman now lives within walking distance of downtown Tahoe City. Eventually, he will get to that never-ending pile of boxes above the garage, if the squirrel doesn’t get there first.
