Moving from one to three

Let me be perfectly honest. This business of writing a column called “From My Heart” just isn’t working because I don’t know what my heart is feeling or doing. It seems to be all over the place. To begin with I began moving house yesterday. All the root-of-your-maladjustment articles I have read in the 74 years I have lived say that moving house is one of the major sources of maladjustment. I think they said it would take six months to adjust to your new house.

 That is, if you are moving from one house into another. I like to do things differently. Or maybe it’s God who makes me do things differently. Instead of moving from one house into another I am moving from one condo into three different condos. This is my most complex move. 

 It began this morning on the treadmill. This is our latest habit. We go down to the gym and walk on the treadmill. We have been doing this more or less steadily for two weeks now. It’s a good habit but it makes getting up from chairs more difficult, maybe because this morning I decided to walk two kilometers. Okay, I hear people who walk 18 kilometers feel superior. Only two kilometers and I’m complaining? Well, the last time I walked two kilometers we had a farm in Los Baños and I was 15 years old. Today I am going on 74, have been living a steadily sedentary life, so this is a big change for me. At the end of two kilometers I am bathed with sweat, another wonderfully strange thing because, before this treadmill adventure, I never used to sweat. It’s strange for me because even if you’re pouring sweat and are physically exhausted you feel good.

 Yesterday I began to move my workroom — the smallest room in my big condo — into my husband’s condominium. We more or less succeeded but only half of the things are here. We moved almost all the big things yesterday. Today I unpacked all my bottles of beads, all of different sizes. I unpacked all my desk things. I unpacked and fixed a lot of things but the room is still a mess. Never mind, one day, sooner rather than later, it will be fixed. Maybe, hopefully, it will be fixed by Monday.

 Tomorrow I have to go to my flat because my movers are coming to pack. On Monday they will move all my personal things into my one-bedroom condo that I’m getting on a rent-to-buy scheme. It seemed big enough when I decided to put the down payment. I heard the sales agent say it was 64 square meters. My present flat is 208 square meters. When the architect turned over the keys I found out the flat is 60.4 square meters, around 29 percent of my current condo. How will I fit? 

 But I’m getting old, I hear God whisper in my ear. I didn’t need my big condo anyway. I got it because it had a big guest room for my children who live abroad. None of them wanted to live in San Juan. So maybe it’s genuinely time to move to a smaller place that I can easily care for as I age.

Then there’s the problem of all my other furniture. Where will I put it? I was getting ready to sell it when my husband said he had a condo that was paid to him as his legal fees around six years ago. He never did anything about it. “Maybe you can put your furniture there,” he suggested. So we went to have a look.

 Was I ever impressed! It was bigger than my new condo. But it was missing two glass windows and had six years worth of dust on the floor. There was a space for a bathroom but we would have to build it and there was another mysterious place in one corner we couldn’t figure out but if we cleaned it, built a bathroom, a small kitchenette and a closet to store the assorted things of our family, it would be worth something. It could become an office. Ideas started to pop into our heads.

 That happened about a month or more ago. We’ve been wanting to get it fixed but things just did not move fast enough. I guess that’s the hand of fate. Sometimes fate moves so slowly. All that’s left for us to do is adjust. I fixed my schedule as required by the buildings I’m moving out of and into.

 Tomorrow it begins. My movers will begin to pack up and the entire process will end on June 14. Please pray for my sanity and be patient with my writing. Remember: moving homes is cause for maladjustment. From now until maybe the end of August the title of this column should be “From My Maladjusted Heart.”

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