My son really wasn't raised by wolves...honest

Ok, in keeping with our wierd little family traditions, my middle son is moving just a few weeks before we are. I'm not sure exactly why this happens, but he moved to Richmond the same weekend we moved into our current apartment almost three years ago. I don't think it's so that he gets out of helping, life just does those funny little things to us.

I expect that a number of things all hit at once. 1. He's living in the top floor of a 120 year old house, in what was obviously servants quarters and only Twiggy in her prime can walk up that last flight of stairs without going up sideways. 2. It's Summer in Winchester....he has just a pathetic whimpy window unit because, he is in a 120 year old house with some rather anemic wiring 3. The charm of living around a bunch of obnoxious college students has worn off. He is without a doubt the OLDEST 23 year old I have ever met. And probably most importantly, 4. He woke up in the middle of the night and realized OMG, Mom is moving, I'll have no place to wash my clothes. (said 120 relic has no laundry facilities and the nearest laundra-mat is around the corner from MY house. ), and no place to go when the power goes out down here and it's either the middle of winter or summer.

Needless to say, I have spent the weekend doing the Mom thing, inbetween packing up my own junk -- my boys swear I have been permanently trapped in maternal overload. In spite of the heat, I put on my grungy shorts and t-shirt and wandered down into the historic district where my child currently lives. Although once I got upstairs and opened all his windows (Oh, gee, I didn't realize I had cross ventilation) the place wasn't bad at all heat wise. CLEAN wise was another story. And while no eggs popped and cooked on the counter, I was fully expecting Zuul to be waiting for me when I got up the nerve to open his fridge. There was dust on the stove, ok, so cooking in this converted little place was not high on his list, at least with a stove of questionable durability. There was apparently some sort of chili/microwave incident on one side of the kitchen. There was a stack of towels, well molded into some semi permanent hardened shape and I kicked them into the trashbag after he suggested I might not want to know how that happened, but that his two best friends from highschool were involved (They WERE raised by wolves). I refused to do the bathroom, well if you could call it that, it's a toilet and a sink tucked into what was obviously a chimmey shaft-the shower is in a closet in his bedroom. Now in his defense, he wasn't expecting the electricity to be so deficient in that place that when you plug in the vacuum, you blow the lights out in the front half of the second floor apartment, or that turning on all the lights in the oddly shapped place, you lose power in the bedroom. And face it, he's a man, sparkling clean floors and kitchen are not high on his wish list. Although calling a coverted bedroom that holds a stand alone stove, sink and fridge a kitchen is probably a stretch of anybody's imagination.

I have scrubbed until my nailpolish peeled, his woodwork is once again white, his kitchen no longer needs to be cleaned up to be condemned and even I would put food in that fridge now. We have bagged up his soda box tower (they are limited to one bag once a week in the historic district), got rid of way more pizza boxes that I really think one person is capable of going through in a week, and generally organized the three of the four rooms in his cut up little apartment. His office, of course, was pristine, but then again, my software developer/php engineer is a bit anal that way. And next weekend, I will be back over there, hauling his clothes over to his new place which has a washer and dryer in the unit and doing the mom thing there. And on the 14th, we'll be hauling what little furniture he was able to get up those Thumbalina sized stairs down to street level and across town into some extremely yuppie digs. I'll be glad to get him settled in before we head out of town, because yes, I will own his little php coding soul and he will have to come and help his Dad move the heavy Ethan Allen furniture out of storage and into it's new home in Hagerstown.

Momma ain't stupid