You’ve seen the guys on the street corners with the signs that say, “Will work for food.” My daughter and I were scheming about a sign that says, “Will buy dinner for help.”
You see, this is that time of year when all the college students make their annual migration back to their nests away from home. It is a time that is both celebrated and dreaded by all people remotely connected with said students.
This year was proving to be worse than most. My daughter had been overseas for a year and had lent a lot of her furniture to friends so that she wouldn’t have to move it in and out of storage. It was going to be super convenient for her to be able to breeze back into town and move her furniture directly from these friends’ houses into her new abode.
But landlords in CollegeStation, Texas (whoop!) really don’t care much about how convenient or inconvenient things are for their tenants. For the most part, kids had
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to vacate their apartments by August15 th; new tenants couldn’t move in until August 18th. That leaves three days of torturous limbo where some students have nowhere to live, an d furniture is being thrown away by the truckload.
We connived, cajoled and begged the new landlord to let us store the furniture there, but to no avail. The whole plan of not having to move the furniture twice was quickly disintegrating. All of her roommates were in similar situations. Two of them were living in a hotel.
We were fortunate because another family member owns a condo there that happened to be empty. We were going to be able to store all the furniture in the condo for the three days until she could move into her apartment.
So she and I got in the pickup and trekked up there to move furniture. Yes, two women. Two small women. We didn’t have much of a plan beyond that, which was bad considering said condo was on the third floor … and no elevators.
When we arrived with the first load, we hauled a bunch of the little stuff up the stairs. Now, considering my age and lack of any sort of exercise regimen beyond keeping up with four kids, you can imagine my condition when I got to the top of the stairs each time. Between huffs and puffs, we laughed about how the heck we were going to get the desk up the stairs.
We considered making a sign that said, “If you’ll help us we’ll buy you dinner!” College boys will do lots of stuff for free food. We thought a better sign might be “Will buy beer for help!”
But there weren’t any people of any shape or size around, so we set about moving the dining table ourselves, up the sidewalk towards the stairs. A nice man appeared out of nowhere and said, “Do you ladies need some help?”
I fought the urge to kiss his feet and simply said, “That would be wonderful.” “Where are you going with it?” he asked.
“The third floor,” we answered. We could see the shift in his eyes, looking to see if he could bolt. Nah, I’m just kidding. He helped us unload the whole truck. We thanked him profusely and went on our way to meet my daughter’s friends for dinner.
After eating, we went to get the second load. Three friends joined us, so now we were five women. With surprising efficiency, we managed to load a whole room of bedroom furniture into the truck, but I was panicked about how we were going to get it up those three flights of stairs. Ugh.
When we got back to the condo complex, we saw the same man, this time standing with his family. He made a quick exit when he saw us. “Smart man,” I thought.
But we were reminded of the goodness in the world when he returned with three strapping young men and announced, “Ladies, I have brought in the Cavalry!”
