A Mother's Day Homecoming

The mother hen is roosting in her new coop. We have successfully moved my mother and all her belongings 666 miles, from Shelby MS to Morganton NC. Mom was raised in Morganton and raised her two sons there. She moved to west Tennessee in 1973 and to Mississippi about 10 years later, but has looked forward to coming home for many years. She now is in a townhouse three blocks from the courthouse square in downtown Morganton. She is a short walk away from many services and the downtown shops.

Dorcas, my brother Ran, and a few of Mom's friends, packed all day last Sunday. On Monday we picked up a 26' U-Haul truck, the biggest, baddest truck that U-Haul offers. U-Haul claims this truck will hold all the furnishings in a 4-bedroom house. They lie. Granted, we are not professional movers, but I put myself through college loading trucks at UPS, and I do know how to pack a tight truck. We packed this one so tight that the mice were suffocating. However, by the time the truck was 3/4 full, it was obvious to all that there just wasn't going to be enough truck. And we still hadn't loaded the beds and mattresses, the exercise bikes, the washer, the dryer, Mom's clothes, her two 1500 pound armoires and the bottle tree. Don't even ask why we were moving an eight-foot tall, 100 pound, wrought iron bottle tree 666 miles to a house with no yard. After much discussion, we determined that U-Haul's 12' trailer (their largest offering) would not be enough, and they had no more trucks. Ultimately we called Budget Rental and rented a 24' truck. Ironically, the Budget truck cost only half what the U-Haul truck cost. On Tuesday we began our trek to North Carolina. The U-Haul truck had a gross weight rating of 20'000 pounds and was certainly overweight. The Budget truck had a gross weight rating of 26,000 pounds and was only 1/3 full. Go figure. We skipped the weigh stations; I was prepared to claim ignorance if we got stopped. Ran and I drove the trucks straight through to Morganton, while the ladies took it easy and spent the night west of Knoxville. On Wednesday and Thursday we unloaded the trucks. On Friday and Saturday we put it all back together and helped her get settled. All in all things went pretty smoothly. We only broke two items, a glass lamp shade (unfortunately, an antique) and a glass hurricane globe. We are still missing two marble table tops, but I know they went onto the truck, so they will show up sooner or later.

The bids from professional moving companies exceeded $10,000. We did it for a small fraction of that price and gave our mother a very happy Mother's Day gift and a fine homecoming.