Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
Moving Day
There is one thing I dread something awful. That thing is about to be imposed on me soon after 2023 gets its start. It’s one of those life events that, in the very long run, is usually worth the effort. I have to keep reminding myself to see the glass half-full as Legal Services of Eastern Missouri moves out of our ancient building into something newer and further down into St. Louis City. I stayed in denial as long as I could until I had to fill out a survey stating what I will need in my new workspace. Also, the move date in mid-January was announced in an email marked “of high importance”. There have been other emails before this one that I conveniently forgot to read. Click. Deleted. Click. Deleted. Click. Deleted… Very popular electronic erasers for us avoiders and procrastinators.
I share an office with the 38 people on my case load. Granted, they are tucked away in folders in file drawers; that makes them relatively easy to move. I have visions, though, of my people getting lost in the moving shuffle. After all, moving boxes all look alike and I don’t have a room number to mark on them. I have a dry erase board with information on each client. That information represents hundreds of hours of phone calls, email, and immigration paperwork. I actually forgot to add that dry erase board and my bulletin board on my list of office necessities, so I better take care of that today.
Today I will spend several hours going through papers that accumulated in a bookcase from the last three people that used this office before me. (At Legal Services, it is a serious decision to put papers in the huge locked shred-it bin in the outer office.) In all my time in this space, no one has come to claim the former trees. In fact, the people that worked in the space have left Legal Services so I won’t feel too bad about disposing of their work.
In my professional life I have moved offices many times over my 46 years of practice. The blessing is that there are always people getting paid to move the really big stuff. But there are things that I move myself – things that I don’t want to have to replace when I unpack in the new space. In the past, however, I’ve always seen the new space before the move. That is not the case this time. There are people now who will decide whether I get an office or a cubicle and I won’t know that until sometime in the future.
I could be a professional mover. In the decade of 2009 to 2018 we moved out of three houses and are now sitting in the fourth one. St. Louis to Santa Fe to Naples to St. Louis. Each time we moved we pledged to downsize and were pretty faithful to that philosophy of less is better. Even doing that, though, we have a storage locker downstairs that is full of boxes of things that haven’t seen the light of day since May of 2018. Jan feels differently about that stuff than I do, so we have not reached a treaty about this issue. Up to me, I would pitch what I could and give most of the rest away.
Growing up overseas as I did, we moved our whole household several times. Twice in Mexico City, then a year in Garden City, New York, then Sao Paulo, Brazil, then Detroit, Michigan, then Tulsa, Oklahoma where my mother lived until she died. In her wisdom, as she aged she downsized in a big way. Cleaning out her apartment, other than the grief of losing her, was her gift to me. She kept only the essentials and some things from her lives overseas. I hope to do that for my own kids someday. But, let me get through this next move!