My Hands Are Just Too Small

Moving According to family folklore, when my grandmother didn’t want to do things, she always said, “but my hands are too small.”

As soon as I found this out, I adopted the phrase as my very own and blamed it on genetics. Learn to use the lawnmower? My hands are too small. Time to help move the refrigerator across the room? My hands are too small. Get a ladder and reach the highest shelf? My hands are too small.

(By now, you’ve probably noticed a theme here, and that theme is manual labor.)

I’ve gotten over my issues with lawnmowers and ladders, but I still find plenty of sweat-inducing tasks to duck out of with my grandmother’s infamous phrase.

There’s no time my aversion to “work” rears its ugly head as much as it does when I’m moving.

I don’t like the packing process. I either find ways to reminisce about every single thing I’m putting in boxes – “Oh my gosh, do you remember when we took this picture outside of Graceland” – grossly slowing down the process, or, when I’m tired of looking at boxes, I go to another default mode – “Can’t we just throw it away?”

I have thrown away more pots, plant stands and random papers than any one human being should have a right to. When I left Chicago, I threw away a pot that still had food in it because I didn’t want to clean it or pack it. (Lazy, thy name is Laurel.)

Yes, I realize environmentalists all over the world are shuddering right now in disgust.

If it’s not the packing, it’s the lifting. (I gave up on driving the van 10 years ago after having to take a U-Haul truck through Washington, D.C. during rush hour.)

Those boxes are so heavy, and there are always more of them. Six years ago I started hiring people just to carry my boxes to whatever vehicle I’d decided on for transport (which I usually made my dad drive). Unfortunately, that also brought out a side of myself that I didn’t like.

“A water break already?”

“Is that all you can carry?”

“Is there a reason you’re just leaning against the wall right now?” 

Paying by the hour did not make me a nice person.

In the moving world, there’s only one option for me, and that’s professional movers. I let them do it all – the packing, the driving, the unloading. It’s like a dream. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few checks I never mind writing.

Thanks to my movers, I hope that next weekend (when I move out of my house and officially become a landlord – eek!) will be as stress-free as moving can possibly be.   

Of course, I’d like to help out the movers as much as I can, but there’s just this one little problem with my hands being so small and all.

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