Today is Di’s birthday! And guess how she gets to spend it? Cleaning the apartment. We got up and started cleaning. Today we needed to pack the car as well. We also had to have lunch with my mom and try to sell the Alero. We started cleaning but then Di’s friends wanted to take her out to breakfast. She deserved to have a good time with her friends one last time even though it was doubtful we would get everything done today. After they came over and picked her up, I went to the post office to mail something and to the school to print the mailing slips and pick up a check for Di. Admittedly, I also ate some Val’s even though it was getting close to lunch time. I came back home and started cleaning once again. Di came home a little while later. Then the auction place came and picked up the end tables, the coffee table, a fitness machine, and the red recliner. After that it was off to lunch with my mom.
During lunch we ended up debating the finer points of the Obamacare plan to which we agreed to disagree on different points. Once again we returned home to clean. We put everything that belonged to my roommate in his room. He still had not finished moving which had me annoyed because he was supposed to help clean the apartment. I figured he would have it in his head that all he was responsible for was his room and bathroom meaning we had to do pretty much everything. Eventually Di’s sister came over for a little while and they were set to buy the car. Of course I still needed it to run a few errands. She cleaned the fridge out and eventually we were close to done and it was almost 8 with the car packed. I drove the Alero over to Julias to drop off yet some more stuff for the garage sale and some stuff of ours for storage. I got to see my nephew and nieces one last time. Something I knew I would not feel the impact of until nearly a week later. Somehow Isaac brought up that he knew a kid that went to California and that is where Spongebob lives. Apparently there is a Spongebob underwater world somewhere in California. Mason, my nephew, asked my sister if he could go with Isaac to California to see Spongebob to which she informed him that I was moving to California. He came and asked me then if he could come visit and we could go see Spongebob. “Of course!” I replied and then he asked me, with the utmost seriousness,
“Do you have scuba gear and flippers?”
“No” I replied. He stared at me with a mixture of disappointment and terror on his face “Well then how are we supposed to visit him?” he inquired. This made me laugh. Here I am writing this 5 days later and I already miss the little guy. Don ‘t worry, I let him know that we can rent the equipment and that returned the excitedness to his face. Oddly enough my neice Raelynn who is 7 months old, did not cry when I was there. Typically when Di is with, Rae will cry when she sees me. I took advantage of her change of heart and gave her a big hug. Chances are that when I see her again she will be twice the size at least.
Everything we have to do to get the apartment ready has been back breaking work and it will not get any easier when we get to Cali. We will be sleeping on beds that are not ours and living out of a suitcase only to toil away the days trying to find work. But even in anticipation of all that, the hardest part was saying goodbye to those nieces and that nephew. To know that from here on out, I will just be an uncle they see at holidays and never really get to know. I will be a man of no consequences to them. I know this is also the hardest part for Di. For somebody that suddenly inherited nieces and a nephew, she has taken to them like her own and loved them to bits. Her nickname from my sisters is the Baby Whisperer because she has a knack with Raelynn always able to calme her down with a Sri Lankan lullaby. It makes it hard to because we know we want to have kids, but we cant do that until we get settled. Well, we could but that would be unfair to everyone in the equation. For now, we will just have to Skype the kids and hope they can sit still long enough to blow us electronic kisses and embrace us with digitized hugs.
Well we eventually got everything done and it was time for Di’s sister to drive off in the night. From the time we decided to sell the Alero until now has been brief. I have barely gotten used to the idea of not having it anymore and I may never see it again. It sounds odd to treat a car with as kind of words as children, but that is the impact it has had on my life. I bought that car brand new when I was 17 and a senior in high school. I drove it off the lot with 64 miles on it. It has seen me through my first girlfriend, my first break up and many after that. It is the car I courted my wife in. The basis of our marriage is friendship and our friendship is built on conversations we had in that car. Di did not have a car and after a day of work together I would drive her home nearly every day. After my classes, after hers. This car has watched me grow up and has been a part of my life for about 10 years. It has been the constant in what has been a wild ride so far. So naturally, I expected to have it there in this next great adventure. If Di was not here, I would not be able to let it go.
Finally we went to sleep on that deformed air mattress. We would get about 6 hours of sleep before we had to get up and get ready to drive to Brookings, SD – the first stop on our route to a new life.
~Mitch Heid!