It's been a week since we moved, but it seems like more. Because of the more jumbled than staggered way we've had to do this, a busy time of the year for moves, we moved out of Brooklyn a week after moving into Manhattan. (We're lucky; many folks have to move out of one place before they can move into another.) Our other fillip is that the new place only gets painted week after next, so we can't fully unpack... and then some new furniture will arrive! House-warming is still weeks away.So I spent much of the last week sorting through things that didn't make the cut for the move - finding new homes for a few hundred books and CDs, and for furnishings we no longer need. I was helped immeasurably here by "the street" - the fact that folks in our part of Brooklyn regularly put no longer needed things in front of their houses for others to pick up. A fine but no longer needed HiFi was gone in an hour (perhaps because I'd conveniently packed it in Trader Joe's bags for easy transport!), and the expandable round table on which I served meals for decades found a new home overnight (I'd packed it for the move, too, putting many layers of masking tape around the edge so it could be rolled without damage), and assorted chairs and side tables - a few of which had themselves come from the street!
It's a great comfort to think of these things finding new homes (or even being resold by canny resellers) rather than ending up in the anonymous black bags bound for landfill which, nevertheless, were shockingly numerous, even after tirelessly separating out anything which could conceivably be recycled). It would be merely tedious work, if much of it weren't stuff which once mattered to me. Luckily (or perhaps unluckily!) this all fell during the first week of a new academic year, when schedules have not yet filled up, so I had plenty of time...
And then there was no more time: I'd promised the landlady everything would be out by Friday night. And, framed by two circuits in a ZipCar along the Hudson and across the East River, it is! Much is alas in plastic bags, though not all are black. The one pleasure may have been ripping apart ancient cardboard boxes and bundling them neatly together in clear recycling bags. And the street gets a final repast, just in time for a sunny weekend. And everything else is in our new home, with, as it were, a new lease on life!
