Sunday, July 25, 2010

Movin' On Up

The vans arrive at the Villa Muscato 2.0 (artist's impression)

Movin' on up indeed, in the immortal words sung so memorably by Miss Ja'net Dubois, albeit to the very far East Side and not exactly to a deeluxe apartment in the sky-hi-hi (although I will be crushingly honest and admit that our new digs are not exactly up to the standards illustrated - the people actually movin' on up in that snap are in fact the Eisenhowers).

Yes, here we are, once again surrounded by a bewildering profusion of random possessions (it's not a good sign when your first thought on opening most boxes is "why on earth did I keep that?") and slowly sorting things out. I have been moving on average every three years or so since I was 18, but that doesn't make the process any less agonizingly annoying. While Mr. Muscato has been almost as consistently nomadic, he is significantly less a packrat than I, and so finds the whole thing that much more depleting.

I keep telling him that moving is like childbirth (a process neither of us, it must be admitted, is particularly familiar with aside from our own arrival), and one never remembers how very unpleasant it was once the baby (or, in this case, the decorator*) arrives. I don't think he believes me.

The dog, on the other hand, restored to us after a bureaucratic process only slightly less Kafka-esque than that required to extract a Soviet dissident, has found his favorite sofa cushion and is entirely content. So some things are as they ought to be.

* Who am I trying to kid, being so grand? To paraphrase Pogo, I have seen the decorator, and he is us.

8 comments:

  1. Glad to see you're starting up again - I assume that the champagne delivery service knows your latest address? :)

    Happy house-warming, or cooling, depending on where you are :)

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  2. Is that the Welcome Wagon pulling up?

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  3. As long as Koko is happy....

    We've been in our house now for 14 years and, as a woman in a NY Times story once put it so charmingly, "the only way I'm leaving here is in an urn."

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  4. Oh dear...I do hope your little soviet dissident is happy and safe now on his cushion.

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  5. Darling, with your exquisite taste, I can't imagine you'd let anyone decorate the place, But yourselves.

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  6. Best of luck, sweetie.

    Did you get the email I sent you? Please respond, or I'll take it quite personally!

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  7. mamie muscato...it has a nice ring to it!

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  8. My parents lived by the depression saying, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" and kept everything that could be useful until we moved every two to three years. It was always fascinating to me to see what would make it to the boxes and what would be gifted/donated/recycled.

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