It Begins...

OGodOGodOGodOGawd.... as the divine Miss Midler used to moan at the beginning of a particularly choice tirade.

Our idyllic interlude of life in an empty flat, it seems, is coming to and end.  The storage people have rung, asking very sweetly whether I might not be willing to take possession of my stuff - more or less my entire life from the late '90s, suspended, not in amber, but in cardboard and wrapping paper.  Well, I don't suppose I really have a choice, and so we are battening the hatches in anticipation of the deluge tomorrow.  Mr. Muscato has no idea what's in store for him.

I found my original inventory from the movers all those years ago a few days ago (oh, in my scatterbrained way I'm very organized.  Up to a point.), and it's even worse than I remembered.  I had forgotten, for example, about the kitchen table.  About the impossibly fragile pair of balloon-backed chairs that to my knowledge haven't actually functioned as sitting devices since the Truman administration.  About the phrenologist's head.  It's a mixed bag, that's for sure, and how it's going to fit into our very moderately sized apartment is an excellent question - and that's leaving in abeyance the question of the three tons of stuff currently making its way here via freighter from the Sandlands.

On the other hand, there will be an archaeological aspect to seeing all those things again, a kind of "who on earth was this person?" feeling about seeing, for example, all the winter clothes I didn't take with me off to West Africa, the boxes of pictures not seen since they were packed away, the letters and refrigerator magnets and, God helped me, the acid-washed tour jacket.  And so many questions: how have the Barbies fared?  What condition was that poster for Joan Crawford's Berserk! really in?  And perhaps the most pressing: was Aunt Edna's silver lustre luncheon set really as horrifying as memory has painted it?

All will shortly be revealed, if we survive.  I suppose we've gotten this far, and now that we're married, at least it's too late for Mr. Muscato to escape. Even from the spectre of the silver lustre luncheon set...