The Move from Hell
Yes, it has been a long time since I appeared on this page.
Probably in the last one or two posts I may have mentioned there might be a
move. It happened. That meant there was no time or energy left for weeks to
share the adventure—the good, the bad and the ugly as it were. I see I also did not finish the long sequence of moving adventures that spans my years; I will pick that up in time--part of my ongoing memoir efforts. I'll go back to that after I get us firmly here, in the new home. Without further ado...
It’s a long and twisty tail—er tale—and a mix of humor, agony, relief at times
and wondering if we would actually survive to see it culminated. We did and I am
here to attest to that. In the end, maybe this move from hell has brought us to
about as near paradise as one can attain in this present life.
As most of you know, we had moved from Colorado Springs to
Alamogordo, New Mexico in the fall of 2011. That in itself was a rather
hellacious move too. In that one we were rushed to get out of a house we had
lease-optioned and basically knew we were never going to advance to the
purchase phase. Charlie, my brother and roommate, had retired a few months
early with a ‘buy out’ and we had a little extra cash from selling a couple of
lots in Silver City, NM that were in our baby brother’s estate.
For that move we loaded three sixteen foot POD units to the
max and then still had to take two twenty six foot U-Haul trucks and did it all
between September 5 and October 14. Due to Charlie’s credit issues from his
divorce a few years earlier, the mortgage for that house was in my name and I
signed the papers on October 5, 2011. We had arrived with the first U-Haul the night
before and gotten grudging permission to bring in beds so we could sleep and
keep the three dogs with us before we were official ‘owners.’
We went from about a 2200 sq ft house to a 1250 one so it
was a mess for quite awhile and we had to rent storage units which we kept the
full eight years. Dumb? Yeah but there are things you just have to do
sometimes.
Anyway we gradually grew less happy with the home and that
area and realized the dust and other factors were unhealthy, at least for us.
Still another move was so daunting and the financial side was going to be
complicated to impossible. So in September 2017 I went back to central Arizona
for a high school reunion and kind of bid farewell to familiar places around
the Verde Valley and northern Arizona. When I got home, I was quite surprised
when one of the first things Charlie said was, “We need to move back to Arizona.”
And so it began. We both haunted Zillow, Trulia and
Realtor.com and soon centered on two areas in opposite corners of the
state—Cochise and Mojave counties. The main reasons were climate, price range
for the type of property we wanted, and especially for Mojave, that the
transcontinental mainline of the BNSF railroad ran through it. The UP southern
route similarly crossed Cochise, a second level draw. We are both rail fans as
you probably know.
We both started sorting and organizing and trying to figure
out how to get literal tons from there to wherever. That went in fits and starts with weather,
occasional health junk and so on often causing a pause in the efforts. But we
kept at it, at least most of the time. Meanwhile the financial side still
seemed to be the biggest barrier. Then almost a year after that start, I
realized I was probably the owner of a piece of real estate in Bisbee, AZ. It
was not suitable for us and I would not live there for love or money but it was
essentially legally mine.
I’ve shared part of that crazy process before. First I found
out I had to do a mini-probate because my late husband’s dad had made him a
co-owner some weeks before we were married which kept it out of our community
property. There were back taxes; the city had a lien due to some unpaid utility
charges—on and on. Finally I had legal ownership duly recorded. Now what? My
eldest stepson had lived there gratis for many, many years but he had no legal
claim since he had not chosen to do the process I had just done. So did I boot
him out or what? In the end, I offered title to him for a reduced price over
what it could have brought on the open market and he agreed. I was almost
surprised but happy to avoid any bad scenes. Finally in mid March of 2019 I
went over to Bisbee, we did the necessary paperwork and he handed me a
cashier’s check for the agreed upon price. I pinched myself for a week—after driving
home in an intermittent snow storm.
That changed the whole picture. It might really be
possible… Our search intensified and we
zeroed in on the Benson area especially though still considering Kingman. In
May Charlie came over driving RHM to do a look around. This part of the state
was familiar to me after living here from 1970-73 and again from 1984 to
2008. He had seen it briefly in passing and was drawn but needed a better exposure. He came back a bit discouraged,
cutting short the plan to go on up to Mojave. Then almost at once another
place came onto the multi-listings and he zipped back to check on it. This was
the one!! It took time and a few more trips—papers to sign, inspections and many
hoops to be cleared but we took possession on the 2nd of July.
Meanwhile we had a health issue with the oldest dog and ended up sending him to
the Rainbow Bridge on Memorial Day. That is a tale for another time.
On July 11, the actual move began with the arrival of the
first big trailer from ABF freight which now operates a do-it-yourself moving
service called U-Pack. And that is where the going got tough and the tough really
had to get going. There were many days
and nights when we each separately shook our heads, tossed and turned unable to sleep, and quietly raged, wept and cussed. While both trying to keep a good face for each other!! How in the name of all holy and unholy were
we going to do this?
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| The last sunrise at Alamo... |
To
be continued!!
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