Wednesday

There are movers in my house right now. It's five, and they are making a last minute inventory of stuff, walking around the house trying to estimate what supplies they will need to bring tomorrow. Apparently, they've run out of book boxes for today. As of five, I have been awake for twenty-nine hours. I stayed up all night doing last-minute stuff, and was actually satisfied that I'd prepared our house correctly by the time these guys showed up to put most of it in boxes this morning. I am very impressed with the work they've gotten done already: except for some doodads here and there, the majority of the downstairs is done, difficult kitchen breakables and oddment tchotchkies alike. They've taken down most of the books and packed them into prefab book boxes; then they've tipped over the bookshelves themselves and packed them into custom-made bookshelf boxes. Our enormous metal star is in a hand-crafted pentagonal envelope, our vacuum cleaner is stuffed into a snug little cone. Like the wicker cat bench we had shipped from Pátzcuaro recently, everything has been encased in its very own form-fitting corrugated and padded shell. This makes the living room look just several Coptic jars shy of Tut's burial vault--if Tut had ruled over a cardboard Egypt. Besides these interesting sculptural boxes lining the walls around the first floor, the house is starting to look pretty empty already. I think this effect happened just after I took all of the refrigerator magnets down and stuck them in a box. Of course, all of the menus and grocery lists and forensic calendars and cabbie business cards and thermal photos of The Cat came down with them, leaving the refrigerator very white, the kitchen very barren, and the house very nearly empty. [Cavin]