PEA RIDGE — Between 2002 and 2011, my family has had the unusual experience (for us) of living in the same place for almost 10 years. Presently, we are involved in moving again. It is just a two-block move, from 167 Patton St.
in Pea Ridge to 665 Asboth Drive. Nancy and I both lived the first 21 some years of our lives in one place, but we have ended up moving many times during our 50 years of marriage. Unless I missed count, this is our 18th time to move since 1961.
Many friends and family members have pitched in to help us move, especially with the large items, and with toting the seeming thousand or so boxes of “stuff.” It reminds us thatfriends and family members are treasures, much to be appreciated. As one who has moved large pianos by myself, it is great to be on one corner of a pianowith three strong friends on the other corners. For this move, my friend Rich Weston had a swivel-roller platform that made moving the piano almost a breeze.
We just lifted one end, set the roller unit under the center and rolled away. I remember when we moved to Searcy in 1981, our piano was a heavy old upright with the rear rollers missing. I had bought it as a junker to be fixed up. Having no one to help move it off our truck and into the house, I built a ramp, unscrewed the handles from our croquet mallets and used the mallet heads as rollers. As I moved the piano forward, one rollerwould roll out at the back and I would move it to the front, one after another, as we slowly moved ahead.
It was a 500-pound piano, but the make-shift rollers moved it with no great effort. I felt like an ancient Egyptian, moving a massive stone block on rolling logs.
Like our present move, the first move I went through as a boy was only a short one. In the spring of 1953, we moved out of our 100-year-old farmhouse into our 24-feet by 24-feet garage. The old house was pretty large, and I was amazed at how we were able to adapt our new little space for almost comfortable living. One corner of the garage was our living room, with a couch (wecalled it a divan in those days) and a couple of chairs. Two other corners were bedrooms, with curtain walls for privacy; and the fourth corner was thekitchen and eating area.
Dad removed the kitchen sink and cabinets from the old house and set them into a south corner of the garage, then ran a water pipe to the sink. We even had a shower outside in back, with tarp walls and a linoleum floor. We had electric lights, a water heater, TV and radio. So even in exile we were living pretty well, we thought.
When we finally finished our new house, after much toil and tribulation, including recovering the project when a heavy rain caved in the whole west side of our new basement wall, we started adjusting to life in the new place. Mother had designed her kitchen to save walking. Her kitchenin the old house was long, fully three-quarters of the length of the house. It was a long walk from the kitchen range to the dining table at the opposite endof the room. So she had made her dream kitchen much smaller, with a walk area between appliances of only 4 feet by 12 feet. She soon found that her dream kitchen was too small. The refrigerator door opened the wrong way, and if another person helped in the kitchen they were always in each other’s way. Interestingly, when we moved into our new house last Friday, one of the first things we discovered is that the refrigerator opens the wrong way.
One of the weird things about moving out of a house where you have lived for years is that you have to wonder how you ever got all your stuff into that house. You may be moving into a larger house, but strangely, your stuff, which somehow fit into the corners of your old house, you now discover is too bulky to fit into the new largerhouse. Another weird thing is that you may not have much, so you think, but when you start packing it up, it takes a gazillion boxes to hold it all. Then, once you get your things into place in your new house, they disappear. You spend a month trying to find stuff. Like, right now, to get ready for breakfast, we open every cabinet door and pull out every drawer, looking for the silverware, the sugar bowl, the cereal boxes, the bread, the jelly. What is it that you need? Oh, that’s still at the old house!
Which drawer did you say the toothpaste is in?
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.
He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 4 on 03/30/2011