If my packing made Bocce nervous, the movers made her go completely ballistic. 
She was outraged and barked non-stop for the first 2 hours they were working in the house. I kept her locked in the upstairs bathroom, which unfortunately has a glass door so she was watching and giving her "This-is-an-outrage!"-bark as they removed all the contents from the house. I think she thought they were robbing us. Eventually, all the ferocious barking took its toll on a dog who is acclimated to a life of incessant langour, and she surrendered and curled up on my bathmat in an exhausted heap.
I didn't let her out until the movers were finished. It was best that she didn't witness the fast and furious dismantling of the household by three people we had never seen before. I wanted to shield her from the upheaval.
As the shelves and furniture were removed an embarassing abundance of dust was revealed on te hardwood floors. Dust bunnies, dust kittens, dust tigers, dust dragons -- we had a whole dust menagerie. "I'm sorry! I'm never at home to do housework," I said to one of the movers. "Is this place totally disgusting?"
"No!!" he said, becoming animated. "This place is not bad at all. There are places that are so dirty that we have to wear gloves." He made a sickened face.
"Ewwww! Really?! That's gross!" I said, feeling terrible for him, but suddenly feeling much better about my own dust menagerie.
I swept and vaccuumed after they removed most of the big pieces, and hours later after they left with all of my stuff in a giant truck on its way to Los Angeles, I let Bocce out of the bathroom where she had been locked away. She sniffed around at the empty house, nails clicking on the hardwood floors as she slunk around looking for a nonexistent cushy surface to curl up on. When she realized that Big Plum (the purple velveteen couch) and my bed were both gone, she looked perplexed by the empty house. I scrubbed clean the kitchen and upstairs bathroom, and began to pack my car full to the roof.
When the Beetle convertible was almost packed to the roof with the remaining boxes, I realized that the cactus plants were left up on the ledge in the upstairs bathroom. I didn't want to leave them behind, so after the car was packed full, I lodged them in the front seat between Bocce and me in the car. I left San Francisco at 7:50 p.m., driving East over the Bay Bridge with a very nervous thin-skinned dog perched precariously atop a shaky stack of clothing aside of an extremely prickly plant. She looked at me dubiously as we began the long drive south.
posted by Jess at 7:55 AM
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