New year, new apartment.

Mere minutes after arriving home from my vacation, I resumed a frantic box-packing marathon that lasted late into the next night (despite all my pre-holiday efforts – dang!), and then for a few more hours the following morning before I absolutely had to go pick up my U-Haul truck or lose my reservation. Last time I moved, I hired three guys, day workers, to help with the heavy lifting, and my plan was to do the same this time around. I’d had a heinous experience with a professional moving company the time before that (they’d held my piano hostage in the pelting rain while extorting more money out of me; I later looked them up in the Better Business Bureau and found that they had a long history of consumer complaints. Lesson learned.)

So on my way to pick up the truck, I thought I’d swing by Home Depot, where I’d heard the day laborers were to be found. A block away, I noticed dozens of guys, who surged toward me in a body as soon as they noticed – almost before I noticed – that I was slowing down. They swarmed around my car, yanking the doors open and sliding in before I could even think. Here I’d thought it would be a sane, measured procedure: I’d find out who knew how to drive, who was experienced at moving. But there they were, three grinning guys in my car and more struggling to squeeze in, knocking on my window with pleading faces. I held up three fingers and shrugged helplessly: Solamente tres.

Hours of delays, frustration, and back-breaking labor ensued (though there were also a couple of angels who swooped in to help in my hour of panic). I valiantly resisted shrill screams of utter desperation. Sweat flew freely, especially when all three Guatemalan guys – and me – wrestled my giant sofabed up a steep, narrow flight of steps, almost toppling it over the railing to the pavement below.

Today I’m bone-tired and I ache in every muscle, including my hands and feet, and I have hundreds of boxes to unpack. But when I opened my door this morning in my beautiful new Los Feliz neighborhood, I heard birdsong and smelled the delicate fragance of the flowers that twine up that very same railing.

Moving takes forever. I went back to the old place at lunch to clean and deal with all the leftover stuff: framed pictures, curtains, curtain rods, all the random detritus that we abandoned yesterday when the truck got full. I’ll be back there tonight loading my car and doing one last, nostalgic load of laundry in my trusty old washer and dryer. (There’s nowhere to put them at the new place. Hello, laundromat.)

P.S. The water pressure in my new shower is amazing.