Grunt and Lift

In the middle of the hallway, the long and relatively narrow hallway that leads from the front of our apartment to the back sits a very large white dresser. Passing requires one to turn and schimmy, with nothing more than a cup of tea in hand (children have a bit easier time at this, and are not allowed to walk around with tea).

With sweaters stacked not at all neatly in a basket on their floor, the girls were in need of furniture. One dresser was fine when their clothes were scaled to doll size, girls who own multiple Obama t-shirts need more space. In that I have not ever, to my recollection, actually purchased furniture from a furniture store, I had no idea that pieces are now made scaled to the wildly large, and vastly open, new houses being built in suburbs nationwide . Furniture to fit in our old apartment, one with actual rooms rather than the much coveted "open concept", was made 100 years ago by men named Jeb. Furniture for the girls was purchased on Craig's List, from a woman who warned us that the pieces were large, but failed to mention that she lived on the third floor of a walk up, at the end of a long and icy front path.

Happy that I was actually buying something, rather than pilfering it from the alley, Jack agreed to rent a van and make the delivery himself. He rang up his former friend Michael, a kind soul who foolishly agreed to forgo his weekly tennis game to spend a frosty evening throwing his back out with Jack.

Three hours after they left there was a thud in the hallway, followed by "LIFT", then a grunt and another thud, this one noticeably louder. Cautiously I opened the door. Wedged between two grown men with tear strained faces was what one might call furniture, a huge white box strapped to a mover thing, that in my previous life could have passed as a studio apartment. They were on the third step, we live on the second floor. Two hours later they rounded the corner into the hallway, the second piece was still in the truck.

For fear of being killed and left to die inside the huge box now sitting in the hallway, I said as little as I could, which was still much more than any wife of reasonable intelligence should have muttered. After five hours of grunt and lift, they stumbled out for pizza and beer. When Jack returned I optimistically suggested we take the entire family out to dinner, as a means of thanks. "Dinner, really? That's going to do it? I can't walk. My arms no longer rise above my shoulders, there are bruises all over my legs. Dinner? He may never play tennis again, he may never talk to us again, he most certainly will never talk to you again".

Right, but what if I threw in a semi new dresser, with room for the entire family to store clothes? We don't really have the space.