Furniture warehouse shuts down

Driving downtown on my way to the farmers market on a recent Saturday morning, I spotted someone I knew.

It was the photographer who took my kids’ senior pictures. He was walking with a woman and a pretty blond teenager. The mom was carrying hangers with several changes of clothing. They were, obviously, taking senior pictures. 

I drove by them again later, a few blocks over. The girl had changed her shirt, and was leaning against a tree as the photographer shot. “This is where it begins,” I think.

Just the week before, we had exited East Lansing with a load of furniture, not planning to go back this time. It was the last of many, many moves in the nine years that, between them, she and her brother spent at Michigan State University.

There were the initial moves into dorms with a cast of thousands, in excruciating heat, then moves out. For her brother, there was the move into the frat house, then out; into an apartment, then out; into a house, then out. For her, it was into a house, then an apartment, then another house. Now, out.

Whew. Meanwhile, the basement at home base Traverse City had become a mini-warehouse of sorts, full of secondhand furniture and boxes. What couldn’t be used from one move to the next came back here.

At one point the basement was overflowing with couches and chairs, two mini-fridges, beds and bed frames, coffee and end tables — so much that I, the packrat, even gave in and sold some just to clear space. That included the pool table – there just wasn’t room.

 Last week, as we took inventory of what my daughter needed to set up her new real-life-because-she’s-graduated-and-has-a-job apartment, I wished I hadn’t.

 Up the basement stairs and into the truck went the blue sofa we bought when she and her brother were still little. Out came a lamp and coffee table bought at a garage sale for one of her brother’s college houses.

We found several boxes of dishes and kitchen utensils still with store tags on them, and those came, too, along with her entire bedroom set. In East Lansing, we picked up the rest of her stuff.

It was bittersweet driving away for the last time, and off into her future. Back home that night, her room was empty, save for dust balls and the myriad pictures on the walls from her high school days. She’d taken a few with her, but it was time to pack the rest away.

Meanwhile, the basement, suddenly, seemed empty. And it all flashed before my eyes when I saw that mom and daughter with the photographer.

The clichés you hear all your life – how time flies, enjoy it while it lasts – are so true. Though I would suggest a new one: Don’t sell the pool table.

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