Being a writer allows me the freedom to embellish but, typically, my posts on this blog are steeped in truth. This post is no different.

A dear friend of mine moved on Tuesday. The process to get to the actual move itself was arduous and emotionally draining. When the day finally came to move, the moving company brigade was nothing like I expected. I arrived just as the team began to unload the first truck and everything seemed normal. But all of that quickly changed.

What seemed like a cohesive team of movers steadily morphed into what could only be described as a slapstick comedy show. What should have been a choreographed routine of piling boxes and other items to make the best use of space, became a haphazard placement of boxes in random places. Movers were entering the house and discarding their shoes as they went down the hallway, only to have the other movers trip over those same shoes with the next item to enter the house, narrowly missing the walls with the items they were carrying. To say it was unorganized would be an egregious understatement.

And then there was Peaches. She may only weigh 110 pounds soaking wet but she could lift just as much weight as her male coworkers. She began the process with strength and confidence, but as the seconds turned into minutes each item she lifted seemed to carry the burden of the weight of the truck itself. She became quickly dehydrated and began to spontaneously shed layers of clothing. The dramatic flair she conveyed with each piece that was discarded, and the voice that sounded like the squeaking of a helium balloon, took everything from comical to moderately disturbing. It wasn’t until I looked out into the driveway and saw her leaning against my friend’s car that I knew we were in trouble. She was arched over the front bumper of his SUV in the pose of Alex from Flashdance moments before the bucket of water was dropped.

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I realized at that moment we had gone from quirky to surreal. To say she was as high as a kite is to say humans need oxygen to survive. As the move progressed, so did the stages of her buzz. When the last item was removed from the truck, the sigh of my friend’s relief could have drowned out the sound of the passing train.

With the exception of a few items that did not fare so well during the move, we thought the process had come to an end. We were hoping to close the door on this fiasco, but the man in charge of the moving company did not feel compelled to leave the house and struck up a bizarre conversation about places my friend could meet some local women. We began to slowly walk backwards into the garage, hoping this would be the end of the adventure, but that was not the case. The moving truck was now stuck in the driveway spinning its wheels on the ice. Thankfully, the rest of the moving team had been waiting to exit together and pulled the truck out of the driveway. I could swear I heard the sound of dueling banjos as they drove down the road.