Contemplating How Junk Grows During a Move

Packing up a household requires a warehouse of cardboard boxes.

The same genie that eats socks in the washing machine also possesses the powers to grow extra knick-knacks and do-dads and bric-a-brac when it comes time to organize our belongings.

I lived in a 450-square foot apartment for two years so when it came time to pack up the hovel, I thought I could do the job in two short days. After the first day of working from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., I looked around and wondered what I had done. I had seven large boxes filled to the brim and not one room emptied. And the movers I hired did not even require that I empty the drawers in desks and dressers.

After the fourth day of a packing marathon, I could no longer walk through the apartment without tripping over one of the dozens of boxes on the floor and those hanging precariously to the edge of furniture.

And I had not even begun to pack my office — a landmine of papers and files. I had not even looked in the walk-in closet — the only closet in the apartment.

I became the St. Augustine box scrounger. Merchants saw me coming and walked to the back room to empty stock before I tore apart the store. One Sunday morning in desperation I even went to Budget Rental and paid for those brown packing crates — the first time I have ever stooped so low. And I still had cupboards filled with pans, shelves loaded with books and cabinets stuffed with cosmetic samples.

Sixty boxes later, I sat waiting for Two Men and a Truck to arrive, hoping they would find me under all the cardboard. When I saw the monster of a truck back up my driveway, I worried that the things in my small apartment would be rolling around the insides all the way from St. Augustine to Tallahassee. When they opened the back doors on the truck, I remarked that the space looked larger than my whole apartment.

“This is a breeze,” one of the movers said. “No big beds or large TVs.”

One hour later, “Where did you have all this stuff stored?” the same man asked. They had not even begun loading the boxes I stored in the garage so I could find my bed during my final days there.

The household genie had worked overtime in my apartment for the past two years.

This past weekend I moved into a house in Tallahassee that is three times the square footage of my apartment, with a two-car garage with cupboards and shelves along all of the walls. I have three walk-in closets and two smaller ones. What seemed overwhelming in the small space now seems swallowed up by wide-open spaces. As I made my bed for the first time in my new house, I had to stretch to place my glasses on the dresser, almost not able to bridge the gap. That had never been a problem in a bedroom where I scrunched my shoulders to walk around the bed.

Shelves sit empty and cupboards bare in my new place, but I know the genie of the house lurks somewhere behind the books, photos and paintings waiting to blow her fertile breath into those gaps in the junk of my life. I am vigilant in these early days of living here, but I know I will become complacent as I begin my new job and discover a new city. The genie’s power comes in her patience.

At first I feared the genie. Now I am resolved that when I move from this house in perhaps a few short years, I will require six men and three trucks and two hundred boxes. Perhaps I should invest in cardboard futures.

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