Across state lines....
I finally feel like we have actually moved to New York. Yes we’ve been here for 6 weeks already, but staying first with friends and then living in our strangely empty apartment didn’t feel very permanent. This weekend however we finally made the trip down south to pick up Andrew’s furniture (and my sewing machine yeah!!)
Let me tell you it was quite a trek, 18 hours over night on a greyhound to get down to Greenville, with the usual suspects, the ex-army guy bragging about his guns, the musician on the way to a concert in Charlotte singing gently to himself behind us the whole (actually this was kind of an unusual treat) the moms with new babies screaming while they gossiped with their new friends, the old ladies so large that they filled most of the neighbouring seat and had to be winched out at rest stops by chivalrous young men. the countryside wedding in the beautiful hills around Seneca, South Carolina made the journey worth while, as did my first meeting with my year old nephew Paul.
The wedding offered me another thrilling glimpse of the old south as the 6 groomsmen posed on hay bales for photographs and adjusted one anothers’ ‘buttonieres’ and aging southern belles drawled ‘oh daahrlin’ I just lurve your accent!’ and clutched me to their bosoms. The jazz quartet a la 1930’s Charleston was a joy and with the southern cuisine beautifully prepared by chef Laurence Mitchell, who had also trekked down from New York, to enjoy it was easier to ignore the conservative menfolk griping about ‘#$%&! Obama’ and his health care reforms.
Sadly our overnight stay with my charming in laws was mared by the need to pack up the moving van, the dust kicked up aggravating my allergies and fraying my temper. We of course spent the first few hours of the drive slowly remembering all the things we’d failed to load up, but were soon distracted by the local radio stations we flicked through constantly and diverse place names on the signs along the way.
We passed Winston-Salem, famous for it’s cigarettes and it’s witch hunts, another Greenville, a second Salem and another Charleston. The highway took us through North Carolina, and into beautiful Virginia, who signs exclaiming ‘Buckle Up Virginia’ made me giggle every few miles, imagining a local farmer talking to his red faced and jolly wife, named of course Virginia. We passed a town called Scotland just after a town called Dublin, then Bethlehem, Strasborg and Christiansburg…
We broke our drive in West Virginia in a mangey motel run by Hindus proclaiming Jesus’ love for us on their signs (over-compensation?). The breakfast in Maryland, a smooth run though Pennysylvania and New Jersey before finally pulling into Brooklyn.
So now here we are Brooklynites at last, admittedly writing this still surrounded by boxes, but moved in none the less.
2 months ago