By the time you read this, I will be…well, I don’t know.

We picked today — the first day in weeks with rain forecast — to move our heavy stuff to storage, while we get ready to move into our furnished summer cottage in a town about a half-hour from here. We’re pretty sure we sold the house. We’re pretty sure the closing is Friday. We’re completely sure that if we wait until Thursday to move the big stuff, something will go wrong and we’ll be stuck sharing the house with the new owner. And he with us.

Has that ever happened, do you wonder?

We don’t want that to happen to us — or to him. He seems like a nice guy. We shall get out of his hair.

We’ve spent the last month whittling back both our stuff, and the help we planned to hire for this move. We started — all starry-eyed and stuff – with thinking we would take a manicured hand to dial a moving company so we could sit  back on Moving Day while they did all the work (maybe taking a moment from sipping our coffee to say, “Yeah, that box over there.”). We ended up with just the two of us, no help but a boatload of coffee.

Why? You do well to ask. We are in our late 50s and riddled with sports and work injuries. We have grown children. We have hearty grandchildren, even. Why don’t we at least call in the troops?

I honestly don’t know, other than I possess a sick need to show that we’ve still got it,  if “it” means we can still lift couches. I am scary-strong, as in freakishly so, though I know I’ve slowed down some. My husband used to lift people and carry them out of burning buildings. He’s no slouch, either.

Yet I swore I’d never do this again. The last time we moved was the fourth time in a year we’d moved (too confusing to go into, but let it be said that my marriage survived that, pretty much/sorta). That was five years ago and I remember the low point being my husband’s Buddha statue inching off the truck and falling — slow-motion — into the street in front of our new house. That was my fault. I’d propped it too close to the edge of the gate and then it fell and the head broke off and rolled into the gutter. We kept the head — which is kind of weird — to display in the backyard. I don’t know what my husband thinks when he walks by it, but I think “Failure.”

But then this time, we started moving stuff bit  by bit — some crap to storage, and some crap to the cottage, because when you are forced to look at all your belongings by how much you want to lift said stuff, it’s all crap. The landlady was nice enough to open up the new place for us even before we signed the lease, which we just did yesterday.

For weeks we’ve been like human-sized ants, carrying load after load, and then we looked around and realized mostly what was left (mostly) was the big stuff, and surely we still have it in us to lift a couch or two.

(Famous last words for a hillbilly? “Hey, y’all. Watch this.”

So that is what we’re doing all day. While you’re sipping your coffee and examining your nails and wondering why you didn’t buy tech stocks when tech stocks meant something, we are lifting couches and cursing under our breath and sometimes out loud, and we’re seeking to end the day still liking one another. Pray for us, won’t you?

This is a long way of saying there may be a couple of days’ break with this blog. Theoretically, we will be up and running with the Interwebs on Thursday. I may still have it tonight in the old place, though if I do, I will be huddled on the floor drinking gruel out of our one remaining bowl. You get the picture. I’ll be back. I’ll be cranky. But don’t you go far.