The packing, the packing….

At the best of times, I am not an organised person. Far from it. I am the one who needs lists written down to figure out what I need to do with my day. I need to run over the tasks I have to have to have to get done the next day, the previous day night and plan out things to the minutest detail to ensure I am able to get everything done in the pocket of time I have while the child is at school, and that I finish what needs to be done in consonance with deadlines which are inevitably breathing fire and brimstone down my neck.
Therefore packing up to shift house scares me. The level of scaring that would probably rank with living alone in a haunted house of the Amityville levels of horror. So many little things one accumulates through years of living in a home that get shoved into drawers and cupboards and shelves and lofts which must be labelled, packed, segregated and accounted for that it dizzies my little head. Crockery being the scariest of them all. They’re delicate little things with exquisite flowers and curlicules or in case of the glassware, cut into reflective facets that twinkle alarmingly when being sipped from. Such delights to buy and such pains to pack. Wrap up. Line box with garments, put wrapped crockery and glassware in painstakingly. And then have mini cardiac arrests and hyperventilate till your eyes are rolling uncontrollably, and you have froth coming out from your mouth every time a vapid packer and mover bangs down the case with absolutely zero understanding of the ‘fragile-handle with care’ you’ve marked carefully across the top of said carton.
And the junk that emerges when one decides to begin packing. Bags and bags of empty plastic containers. Odds and ends of wires and electrical sockets and plug points never installed and such like. Bits and pieces of wood in odd sizes left over from when we had the wood work done in this current residence. Old clothes kept away for memories, mothballs and the other batch of old clothes kept for giving away of which both end up stored carefully no doubt intending to continued in stored format under the meteor strikes or a tsumami forces us to evacuate to shelters high in the Sahyadris. Clothes long outgrown that one hopes against hope that one would someday fit right back into even though the style has gone beyond being retro fashion and vintage to being simply old threads, unredeemable by any labelling.
And then the sensitivity that lets weighted stuff be put on top of the lighter stuff which results in a kind of unpleasant breakage when it finally disembarks at its destination to be chucked away hurriedly at the ground floor stage itself rather than it being carted all the way up the many floors to the house being shifted into.
After all the loading and unloading, the actual settling in of stuff, the days it takes to get the kitchen into working order with all the ingredients of a regular meal arranged in some coherent order, that’s another hell altogether. I have the advantage of course, that I am shifting right to the next suburb, barely five minutes from my current home. I am shifting within my city where I don’t have to bother with a shift in school admissions and such like. I have a network of friends within the city whom I will not lose contact with and lose out on face to face time. So I don’t have anything to dread really about this shifting. Except the actual shifting. Can I just outsource the entire process and move in once they’ve settled in everything, organised the kitchen cabinets, put the clothes in the cupboards and found me a good maid? Yup. The maid being a prequisite to me actually physically moving in. If you find me pulling my hair out in bunches, muttering to myself, or poring over lists in the next few days, be kind, get me a cuppa piping hot chai, daub my fevered brow with a cool cloth and be sympathetic. I’m packing.