Packing, packing, packing. Get those doggies packing, get those doggies packing. Rawhide!

I feel like the Dunkin’ Donuts mustached man, who wakes up and stumbles in to start making donuts and goes to bed, exhausted from making donuts. I wake up and think of packing, and go to sleep and think of packing. I can’t really even relax in my own home, because if I see something that needs to be packed, I start packing it. Or think I should be packing it.

I gave myself a self-imposed rule that I wouldn’t pack before 8 or after 8, so I could enjoy my coffee and be done after I watched Jeopardy, but then immediately broke it. I saw something that needed to packed on the way to making my coffee at 7 and left the bedroom (due to snoring) at 10:30 at night and packed up a drawer in the buffet. There are no boundaries to my packing and it does seem endless.

The garage, one of the areas I couldn’t face cleaning, even as we listed our house, has yet to be packed. Ugh. But another place I dreaded most- the upstairs attic- was tackled yesterday, or at least we started it. Up there was a lot of my grandmother’s stuff, Halloween costumes, Christmas stuff, photos, artwork, schoolwork from all the kids, plus baseball, softball and soccer uniforms.

One Sunday last summer I held the “Last Spaghetti Sunday”, where I made pasta and put out all of my grandmother’s stuff- photos, birthday cards, books, memorabilia, furniture, etc and let everyone take whatever they wanted and packed up the rest into plastic bins and took it down to the Keys.

Kelley helped me with packing up the attic, although she wasn’t as ruthless as I would have wanted. “Oh, you have to keep that!” she said to me about something (my mother’s wedding dress) that I was definitely going to get rid of. So it stayed, as did a lot of stuff that I may not have room for.

This house is huge (one of the reasons we’re moving) but while it has four rooms (as opposed to six), two of the rooms have attic space and it also has a three-car garage. Each of these spaces is full to the rafters with stuff.

An unexpectedly difficult room to pack has been my den. Fifty years of writing (and writing ideas) are in that room, along with ten thousand books, tax info, files, warranties, stationery, office supplies, art supplies, gift wrapping paraphernalia, greeting cards and lots of misc… I started packing it about a month ago and I’m still not finished. I am trying to organize and purge as I pack, so it is a meticulous and painfully slow endeavor.

As if life wasn’t complicated enough, Zeke decided he hated the floors in our new house, so we’re demo-ing the floors in every room and replacing them with something lighter. One of the reasons I liked that house was that all the floors were the same- very difficult to find in houses for some reason- and now we are changing them.

“We want to have them in here by Thanksgiving, at the latest by Christmas,” my designer told Danny, who is doing the work.

Christmas??? One of the reasons I was anxious to find a house to buy was so we wouldn’t have to put our stuff in storage and “move twice”, which it looks like we’re going to do.

You may ask where Zeke is in all this packing. A couple weeks ago, he took a shoe box and loaded it with pantry items from the garage. He was very proud of himself at this feat.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Everyone knows food is the last thing to be packed,” I said.

And he moved our UM chairs to the new house, which we will need for the first UM game next week. So his role has been to assemble boxes and to move packed boxes into the garage of our new house. And, when we pack the dreaded garage, he will help me with that.

I do finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is good because I only have about two weeks to finish packing. And after two rejections, I found someone to hold an estate sale for me, which will take place the weekend of October 2nd.

While packing, I’ve been having vivid and weird dreams. Last night I had a dream an ambulance showed up at my door, with a garishly-made up dead body on the hood. Apparently this “symbolizes an urgent confrontation with an ending, a final loss or deep-seated fears arriving directly at your personal boundaries”. Sounds about right.

But for now “Time to make the donuts.”