Where does the time goes? We’re half way through the week and almost half way through our fifty-nine days of grace in our old house. Each day that passes makes me even more grateful that we didn’t have to move twice, once to temporary housing as the new owners rushed to move in and then to our next home. I don’t think there would have been enough hours in the day.

It’s definitely an “Eating the Elephant” kind of situation, the one where you continue to take small bite after small bite on a regular basis in the hope of eventually swallowing the whole thing. If this really were an elephant, then Earl and I have consumed the trunk, the head, and the front legs. Maybe even part of the torso, but we definitely have at least half to go. There will be great rejoicing when we finish the tail!

And what defines the tail? Is it that day when all our possessions are out of the old house and in the new. Even though most of them are still boxed or crated? Is it when our artwork is hung on the walls? Or when our new furniture arrives? Or what?

To define the tail, I’ve set a deadline. All of the things mentioned above need to be done by the time we take our annual winter cruise, so that we return to a home that is welcoming and complete. At least as complete as any home is in any given moment.

This time our cruise is scheduled for February 28 through March 10, 2010. Which means the elephant will be with us for some time to come. He’s sort of the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room . . . only in disguise.

It’s Sunday, the traditional day of rest, but we are still forging ahead with moving plans. They never take a day of rest.

After Earl returned from church, we dined on Rooster’s chicken for lunch. It’s an aberration in Earl’s world, since he doesn’t like people to eat in his car. But Rooster’s only has carry-out, so we purchased the chicken, retired to the parking lot, and consumed said chicken before re-starting the car. In between the purchase and the final bite, Earl was heard making sounds that suggest he’s in heaven. It’s the only chicken I’ve ever seen him eat with his fingers; usually he picks with his knife and fork.

Then it’s off to the lockers to add more items to storage. Our lockers are #52 and #57, so we’ve combined them together into the address 5257 Locker Lane. So far, we’ve stored various cardboard wardrobes of clothing, memorabilia from our families, extraneous luggage we’re not ready to give up, painting supplies, an ice chest, and a generator.

We’re realizing that we still have a lot of “stuff,” that possibly our promise to each other to have only one locker, instead of two, this time next year is optimistic. Earl seemed dismayed that we might not reach this goal; but I say it’s better to have two lockers than to have our new home look like a warehouse. At the same time, I’m not opting for three lockers. The address would be undecipherable.

We’re still bringing items to our lockers, and today Earl accused me of “decorating” the lockers. The truth is, I am “organizing” them. There is a distinct difference.

Decorating is what you do to stamp your own personality on a room, a home, even a wardrobe. It defines who you are. As for me, I’m eclectic, casual, creative. I’ve hung picture frames with no pictures in them, displayed Winnie the Pooh memorabilia, and collected artwork reminiscent of Remington. I’ve agreed to an actual buffalo skull in our living room.

None of this evident in the two lockers we’re filling. Rather, what’s happening is that I want to be able to get something, anything, from the lockers without having to empty them in the dead of winter to find the thing I want. Last year, for instance, we had a locker; and, when we rented it in May, Earl put our holiday decorations at the very back. What happened when November arrived wasn’t a pretty sight, as he and our handyman had to juggle contents in order to retrieve the Christmas lights and Waterford ornaments. We never did find the swag that hung on the front door.

So we’ve taken the shelves that stood in our garage and moved them to the lockers, since we probably aren’t going to have much room in our new garage for anything other than our cars. And, slowly, thoughtfully, we’re filling the shelves. Thereon sits extra luggage, Earl’s boxes that contain his history of the past ten years, a generator, and an ice chest. Huddled close by are the cardboard wardrobes that contain off-season clothing. Soon lawn chairs and bikes will show up; and we’ll figure a way to make them accessible when the season for them arrives once again.

In none of this do I have plans to wallpaper the locker or expose Winnie the Pooh or even hang a buffalo head there.

This is the first day in memory that I haven’t visited our new home. Instead I visited the mother of a friend who is in an assisted living facility and learning to crochet. (To be grammatically clear, the mother is in the facility, not the friend.) It’s 180 degrees from the hurry-up pace of trying to move. I got to Ruth’s around 10:30 this morning, strong steaming coffee for the two of us in hand. We chatted a bit and then got down to business.

Ruth is making a winter scarf for her daughter and has chosen, unintentionally, a most difficult pattern. I volunteered to help her do it, since I learned to crochet when my sons were little, back in the seventies, and have tackled various projects of various difficulty since.

One challenge to this particular pattern is that each of the 26 rows involved is different. So it’s hard to find a rhythm to sustain the entire project. This morning we worked on Row Six. I have no doubt Ruth will master this, for she is highly motivated; but I’m not sure we’ll have it done soon. Maybe it’s a winter scarf for a year from now.

In the meantime, I’m learning too. Learning that older people have various skills in spite of possible visible infirmities. Ruth uses a walker, but she grasps the concepts of fisherman’s crochet. Her fingers might struggle to do it, but that doesn’t mean her mind is struggling. She will persevere, and I’ll wait for a phone call that she’s finished Row Six. Then I’ll return, regardless of what’s happening with our moving project, and we’ll master Row Seven together.

If yesterday was Locker Day, today was Tile Day.

Finally met Tim, who is installing our ceramic tile and hardwood flooring. I was paranoid about these installations because we had a horrible, terrible, incompetent, uncaring person install the tile in our current bathrooms a few years back. The only good that came of it was that I learned what I didn’t want.

I suspect Tim felt challenged, but I tried to explain that it wasn’t about him. Really, it wasn’t. It was about my former tile man. Who wasn’t as cute as Tim either. I know, that’s irrelevant; but it didn’t go unnoticed.

So I met Tim in the morning to make sure he’d brought the correct tiles and grout. Then I went back in the afternoon to see the progress. While everything was only in the beginning stages, I could tell that this man knew how to tile. The tiles themselves were laid out as I’d wished, the correct spacing between each. The diagonal design I’d requested was truly diagonal. I was thrilled. And he was still cute.

This was Locker Day.

The one thing about our new home is that it is sparse in terms of storage. There are even two rooms that have no closets. So, Earl and I have rented a couple lockers at a storage facility nearby, and we plan to store off-season clothing, real estate signs, seasonal sport equipment, and other accoutrements there for the time being.

This morning Earl, our handyman Michael, and I went to the lockers to organize them for the “stuff” that is to follow. We rearranged the pallets we’d previously acquired on the concrete floor. We put up pegboard for Earl to fill with various items, and we installed metal shelving. I have no doubt that, as time passes, these lockers will resemble Fibber McGee’s closet more than they will resemble Anne Brandt’s storage space. But it’s a beginning.

I’m rethinking some recent decisions. Like the one I made to purchase various furniture items for the new home before we moved in. And the one about wanting a Blackberry®. And maybe even the one about buying a refrigerator for the garage.

Now that most of our furniture has left the building, literally, I’m thinking I’d like to see how what’s left works in the new space before I introduce other chairs, cabinets, and cushions. Which means the fancy La-z-Boy I’d envisioned for Earl is on hold. This, in turn, means his grandson won’t get the ugly red recliner we have as quickly as I’d thought. Sorry, Alex. In the end, however, I hope we’ll make better purchase decisions.

The Blackberry® is another issue. I was excited to move into the smart phone generation three weeks ago when both Earl and I upgraded to a Blackberry®. Since then, it’s been nothing but problems. My computer and my phone talk, but they’ve totally confused the people in New York City that I work for. I don’t like the way contacts are managed and I certainly don’t like the touch-tone feature on the Blackberry® Storm. I’ll be at my phone vendor’s tomorrow to make changes.

As for the refrigerator, we thought we needed one as a back-up beverage center in our garage. Turns out that we’re not sure we can open its door if our cars are inside. It’s one of those situations where we’re downsizing from a three-and-a-half car garage plus tool room to your basic two-car variety. And quite possibly we need to downsize our refrigerators as well. Maybe we’ll have to drink fewer beverages too.

As Earl watched the Chicago Bears trounce the Detroit Lions, I set about to make our home livable for the next five weeks, even though we have little furniture and many boxes. The construction of our next home won’t be finished until the end of October, which means we’re camping out . . . in.

Why did we send the excess furniture away so soon? Because the auction house wanted time to photograph it, put it on the Internet for marketing purposes, and help us get the best dollar we can for the items involved even though the auction itself isn’t for another three weeks.

It was fine with me. I see now that the actual move from here to our new place will be easier and quicker because all the things that didn’t make the cut are already gone. It’s a slow death approach to moving (as opposed to gritting one’s teeth, packing everything up, and taking it with), but so far it’s working.

Even though there’s only one chair on our living room, I arranged it so that I can watch a fire in the fireplace with a lamp on my left for reading and a little table on my right for holding my current book. I’ll ignore the north corner where boxes are stacked and waiting to be put on a truck.

The room sounds hollow, understandably, when I play piano; but that’s all right. At least I can play through all this.

What the movers left behind could probably fill a one bedroom apartment, nothing larger. For me, it feels rather liberating to have sent so much clutter from my life. It’s not that I didn’t love the clutter – I certainly did – and I most surely enjoyed the process of acquiring it.

Earl and I are rather compulsive about neatness, keeping things in pristine condition while still using them, and often wanting to add a souvenir from a trip here or a memento from a trip there to our home. It was inevitable that we’d have a lot of stuff and that we’d spend a lot of time caring for it. So I’m dubbing these past ten years as “The Decade of Stuff.”

Today I’ve roamed our house – literally – and not missed the things we’ve sent off to the auction. I loved them in the moment, but now we’re looking at new moments and I’m eager to move on.

When we first moved into this house, my great friend Carol told me there were five stages to life, according to some Eastern philosophies. I can’t remember the first four, but the final one is called ‘Mendicant.’ It’s the one where you divest yourself of extraneous things and focus on what’s really important. Granted, part of the reason for the auction is that we’re moving to a place that’s half the size of our current home; and I don’t want it to have that warehouse look.

At the same time, maybe the mendicant in us is also at work. At this point, what’s really important is to make life simpler so that we can concentrate of spending time together, freer of household responsibility. Freer of funding a home that has clearly become too big for us and requires a “staff” to maintain in the way we like. Freer of stuff.

I think I’ll book a cruise to celebrate.