Six Days in Leningrad

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Kevin and I got to our new house at 8:20 in the morning and not a moment too soon because the moving truck was already parked in front of the driveway. We had to drive on the grass to go around it. We had barely opened the garage doors when the moving guys started laying down their moving blankets and getting out their wheeling carts. The next thing we knew, they were moving stuff into the house.

Into a house, I might add, that wasn’t ready yet. The builder’s cleaning crew had just arrived. The cleaning women were in the kitchen, scrubbing. The movers started piling boxes onto the carpet that had not been vacuumed since the day it was installed. So, in other words, never.

I asked the women to please vacuum the rooms before they continued with their other tasks so that the movers could pile the boxes onto clean carpets. You would have thought I had asked them to carry heavy objects on their backs upstairs in 100-degree heat. First the diminutive ladies huffed and puffed, and then they said they spoke no Inglés. Phil, my building manager, explained to me that the women worked at their own pace and according to their own schedule. I looked at him as if he were not speaking Inglés to me and finally said, “Phil, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re moving in. Please ask them to vacuum the floor in the bedroom and the living room.”

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