You would think I’d be an expert at moving states. I’ve done it six times over the course of my life, but I forgot about Sesame Street logic. Not all moving experiences are the same. This one was different from the others. This move has been as difficult at times as a booby-trapped obstacle course in Satan’s relocation boot camp. Technology has glitched as much as it’s glided, though sometimes it was an ID10t error. I’ve had to prove my identity over and over. Verification culture is relentless. Some days, I just wanted to talk to a human being about issues gone awry. Is that too much to ask in our wireless world?

The move took five months and literally required heavy lifting. One’s possessions never fit into a new house in exactly the same way they fit into the old house. Even the silverware might not find a permanent drawer right away, and a chest of drawers might have to visit three rooms before it finds its wall.

The first step in moving states is to commit to the relocation. I’ve paid lip service to the idea of moving to Milwaukee for several years because my daughter and her family live there. My relocation fantasy was a running mother-in-law joke between my daughter and her husband, Tony, son-in-law nonpareil. “When is your mother really going to move?” he would ask. She answered, “I don’t know. When is your mother going to retire?”

During a summer visit with my daughter and her family this past July, I noticed the house across the street was vacant. For eighteen years, I’d been admiring the house across the street, with its moss green siding and cream shutters, its landscaping and clean curb appeal. Sadly, as it turned out, the previous owner had passed away. After the house was emptied of its personal effects, the heirs intended to sell it.

The house across the street was available, and I wasn’t getting any younger. Our extended family includes aging family members, and long-distance care support is increasingly difficult. My parents and extended family live in Texas, my daughter and her family in Milwaukee, while I was raising the roof in Fairmont, WV with Greg. I was spending too much time on interstates and in airports just to see people I cared about. I blamed it on the curse my mother cast when I left Texas thirty years ago. She said, “After you move away, Suzanne, you’ll spend every holiday and vacation for the rest of your life traveling to see family.”

If I lived across the street from my daughter, we could join forces to meet the realities of aging and chronic or terminal illness, plus I’d be near my granddaughters, and friends and writers from UWM and beyond. But before I could commit, I had to ask Greg if he was willing to relocate. Even though he’s authentic West Virginia, raised in Gypsy and Shinnston, he gave me a thumbs up because he’s a fan of Milwaukee and its fanfare.

I announced to my daughter and her husband I was committed to moving to Milwaukee. Tony laughed, and my daughter said she’d have to see it to believe it.

When we got back to Fairmont, the plotting began. First, I had to get my house ready to sell. At the same time, I was talking to the trustees about the house across the street in Milwaukee. It would not be ready for viewing until the end of September, at which point, they would schedule an appraisal to value it for estate purposes.

People always said they wanted to buy my house on Farms Drive in Fairmont because it’s on a historic street. Farms Drive was originally a lane through the Watson family’s homestead where the coal “baron” and U.S. Senator, Clarence W. Watson, bred horses in a swanky two-story stable, including the renowned Lord Baltimore, who won the National Horse Show Gold Cup in 1907. But as Lily, the caretaker’s daughter in Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” would say, “Those people that wanted to buy my house is only all palaver.” I did not sell my house word of mouth, and I had no time to waste. I enlisted a real estate agent, the excellent Vera Sansalone, who made staging and repair recommendations and suggested a listing price.

It took two weeks to paint and declutter the house before it was ready to show to prospective buyers. The MLS listing on 922 Farms Drive went live on August 26. I had not yet peeped inside the house across the street from my daughter. I needed a backup list of potential properties in Milwaukee. I scoured Zillow and Realtor.com daily to look at houses in my price range. Real estate listings are as much fun to browse as filling online shopping baskets with goods you don’t intend to buy. My daughter and Greg got involved in the search, and we swapped links of promising properties.

During this phase, I also got preapproved for a mortgage. My daughter recommended Educators Credit Union in Milwaukee, where she and many of her teaching colleagues banked. Basically, to get preapproved for a mortgage, I had to surrender two years plus of my financial identity. Gathering the required documents was a tedious but necessary task. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was only step one of finalizing a mortgage.

Everyone knows when a house is on the market, it has to be kept spotless and vacated on an hour’s notice for showings to prospective buyers. There were nine or eleven or twelve showing the first week, so many I stopped counting. The offer we accepted came in after nine days. Our approximate closing date was October 25. During the next phase, my mantra was, “The hairier, the merrier.”

We had to pack up our lives, select a moving method and company, inform our friends and family of the date, and notify the USPS and a dozen other entities of our upcoming temporary address. (My daughter let me borrow hers until we had a permanent address in Milwaukee.) We packed the house in waves, starting with closets, lower cabinets, and spare rooms. I like to consider myself a minimalist, but there was still a lot of stuff after sixteen years on Farms Drive. And then there was the garage, a catchall for items as small as a tack and as large as a lawn tractor. Everything we touched fell into one of four categories: give away, donate, trash, or take with.

Researching moving options online, I decided to go with U-Pack, a nationwide company with decent reviews that had a depot in Fairmont. For a reasonable price, a U-Pack driver would drop off a 28-foot trailer for three days and then pick it up and drive it to Milwaukee. It was my responsibility to hire movers to load our possessions. Greg said he would take care of it. He and his buddy, Donnie Sevier, got it done, with the help of Greg’s son and his wife, though by the end, they were throwing stuff on the trailer. The U-Pack driver picked the trailer up on October 23. We had until November 29 to provide a delivery destination. If I missed the deadline on the Milwaukee end, the storage fee for our possessions would be $1,000 a month.

At this point, my daughter had met with the trustees and seen the inside of the house across the street. She sent me a few pictures, but I couldn’t commit to buying the place until we had seen and inspected the house in person.

We closed the sale of the Farms Drive house on October 24 and hit the road for Wisconsin before the ink was dry on the settlement check. My immediate plan was to open a checking account at Educators Credit Union and deposit the funds, since it was the bank where I was preapproved for a mortgage.

That was a huge misstep. In Wisconsin, maybe in every state, you cannot open a checking account without a driver’s license. And you can’t get a driver’s license without proof of permanent residence, like a utility bill or qualifying mail, which I forgot to pack because I didn’t have them. Luckily, my USPS “welcome package” arrived a week later. The welcome letter made it possible to obtain a “regular” driver’s license, which is “not for federal purposes.”

It was a good thing we voted early and blue in West Virginia because we missed the cutoff to register in Wisconsin. It was also good that a “regular” license was enough to open a checking account, though Educators Credit Union froze the funds from the settlement for nine business days due to the out-of-state source of the check, which caused a wrinkle in paying U-Pack.

The day after we arrived in Milwaukee, we were finally able to tour the house across the street from my daughter, a post-World War II ranch whose main attraction was location, location, location, and also a renovated kitchen with an induction stovetop (still not sold) and main bathroom. Who doesn’t want a shiny walk-in with grab bars and two shower wands? We agreed on a price and signed a contract at first sight, which was delivered to Educators Credit Union first thing on Monday morning, October 28.

Securing a mortgage is more complicated than getting preapproved for a loan, as is changing one’s residential identity. I was bombarded with document and signature requests, which meant reloading all the original document I’d provided along with a few more. At least e-signing was often a convenient option. The underwriters asked for explanations of small financial decisions I had made the previous year, like financing a room of carpet in the Farms Drive house with a twelve-month-same-as-cash loan. The balance on the loan was under $500, but I still had to justify the purchase. It also turned out the contract needed an addendum. Every time the bank made a request, I jumped on it like Pavlov’s best dog. I put all my energy into manifesting a mortgage so I could meet U-Pack’s deadline.

Finally, the closing on the house across the street, the W. Morgan Avenue house, was scheduled. The day dawned, Thursday, November 21, with a thick, wet snowstorm that snarled traffic and delayed our arrival at the title company. The lawyer in charge wasn’t worried about it, so neither were we. Once I signed the paperwork and had the keys in hand, it looked like smooth sailing ahead. All I had to do was contact U-Pack and schedule delivery of our possessions, and then contact HireAHelper.com for day laborers to unload it. I had been reassured by my U-Pack rep that the trailer could be delivered with twenty-four-hours’ notice.

But nothing is ever easy, kids. Complications are inevitable. It turned out U-Pack does not work on weekends, and they would not be working on or around the Thanksgiving holiday either. Waiting until after the holiday would push me past the November 29 deadline and cost another $1,000, plus we were ready to sleep in our own bed on our own sheets and eat with our own forks, a pattern I love called Squiggle by Cambridge.

The U-Pack rep said the best they could do was drop the 28-foot trailer off the very next day, Friday, and pick it up the following Monday, giving us three days to unload. The problem was, our new driveway was too short to accommodate the trailer, and the City of Milwaukee has strict parking regulations. You cannot even park a car on the street overnight without a permit or you’ll risk a violation. A 28-foot trailer on the street for three days would certainly get ticketed, and possibly even towed.

The U-Pack rep said that was my problem. I should check into getting a temporary parking permit for the trailer. Which is how I discovered that the City of Milwaukee does not issue temporary parking permits for trailers over 21 feet, and that it takes two weeks for a temporary permit to get approved anyway.

I told my U-Pack rep I wanted the trailer dropped off and picked up the same day. She hemmed and hawed and conceded that if the trailer was emptied before 2:30 in the afternoon, I could call and have it picked it up, though it might be as late as midnight when the driver arrived to hook up and haul it.

Great, so far, so good. I requested that the trailer be dropped off by 9 a.m. on Friday morning.

That, she said, was a “no can do.” The window for the trailer drop-off was between 9 a.m. and noon, She suggested I have the movers arrive at noon, so they wouldn’t be standing around. That meant a 28-foot trailer that took two days to load would need to be unloaded in two-and-a-half hours. The logistics made some of my hair fall out.

I said, “Let’s schedule the drop off,” secretly pledging to call for pick-up by 2:30 even if the trailer wasn’t empty. I set an alarm on my phone to remind myself. I mean, my understanding was that U-Pack dispatch might not even send a driver to pick the trailer up until midnight. I was taking a risk, but it felt like an educated gamble.

To help cover my bet, I hired three laborers for four hours through HireAHelper.com, who contracted the job to Promovers, a local outfit. Andrew, my Promovers rep, was great. He was easy to contact and even sent the crew early after the trailer had arrived. Sure, three young, burly guys in a hurry dinged a few things along the way, but nothing that’s kept me awake at night. Greg directed the move from the trailer end, and I directed the movers in the house. Between the front door and the back door, I ran back and forth, sending boxes and furniture to bedrooms, the living room, kitchen, spare rooms, and basement. Twenty-three small-sized boxes of books were delivered to my designated office. The movers never took a break, though Eddy and Omar accepted cream sodas when I offered them a drink.

It took three hours to empty the trailer. We made the window with time to spare. Maybe the house looked like a giant toddler had stacked our possessions inside it, a maze of box towers and furniture at odd angles, and nothing assembled, but no parking violations or extra storage fees were incurred.

At this late date, December 11, we are far from unpacked but settled in enough to feed ourselves and have a daily life. It took five months to move into the house across the street. I worked as hard as a woman born in 1962 can work to make the relocation happen. I like to attribute my tenacity to the fact that I was born in the year of the Tiger. What I’ve left out is a myriad of relationships and details, like the two beautiful weddings of friends we attended over the summer, another dear friend’s passing, and the usual round of culprits that worry or console me, near and far. Maybe we moved, but the larger world scape never slowed down for a second. It took five months to move to Milwaukee, and what hasn’t changed remains the same.