I got into a conversation last night with my mother-in-law about cookware. The reason for this discussion was a mistake I’d made about not checking inside the oven before turning it on. She stores some of her pans in there, and I fried two handle covers. But I’d discovered that I could order replacement ones, so I’d told her about that, and then somehow we started talking about various metals that are used for pots and pans, and she mentioned that someone who’d stayed with them many years ago had given her a set of copper pans with a cooktop included. “Where is it?” I asked, intrigued. “Oh, somewhere in the garage. I’ve never used it–I don’t have room for it. I’d have to use it on top of the stove, and that wouldn’t make any sense–I’d be using it on top of the burners that are already there.”
When I went into the garage just now to look for it I realized that the quest was hopeless, mainly because all of our stuff is in there, plus a lot that had to be moved out of the downstairs to make room for us.
This may sound like a very first-world issue. If you’re a refugee, your signature color is whatever happens to be on the clothes and blankets you manage to find. You don’t have the problem of wedding out your closet. You don’t have a closet, or a house surrounding it. As I said recently about some small problem or the other connected with our move, “I don’t have to worry about getting to the well and back again without somebody shooting me, so I don’t have anything to complain about.” On closing day, that pretty horrible time, I reminded myself, “This day isn’t going to end with anyone diseased or dead. The worst than can happen is that we’ll have to pay that $100 penalty if we don’t do the closing today.” 
Right now we are living in the midst of chaos, with our possessions scattered hither and yon, whether downstairs or upstairs or out on the porch or driveway. And that doesn’t even include the main stuff in the pods, which will arrive this afternoon.
Sunday evening, May 21: Here I sit on the stairs of our soon-not-to-be-ours house, and I’m so tired that this is the only thing I can do. It’s too early to go to bed, I don’t have any books I want to read, and there’s no TV. And pretty much no internet, although once in awhile I can get a faint waft of Xfinity wifi. So I’m writing a post! Aren’t you flattered!
Today’s pretty happy around our house. My son, Gideon, was informed today that he has been accepted in the MFA program in creative writing at Virginia Tech. Getting to this point has been a long, long process that actually started well over a year ago when Gideon was a senior in college. At that point he really wanted to go to grad school and worked pretty hard on writing all the ridiculous stuff that the various schools required—mission statements,
The Perpetual Now: A Story of Amnesia, Memory and Love by Michael D. Lemonick, published by Doubleday, 2016. Visit the author’s website at 
Periodically I’ll get into a discussion about the question above. My dear friend Cecelia and I used to argue (sort of–she’s too nice of a person to really get into it) about this issue. She’d say, “I think you need to accept people the way they are” and I’d say, “But Cecelia, then how will they ever change?” We would have this discussion in particular about a mutual friend who . . . well, I won’t give any details. Suffice it to say that what Cecelia thought of as harmless eccentricities I thought of as remediable faults. (Not that I was being judgy or anything.)