Moving Day

As we continue our wonderful retirement adventure of moving from an enormous house to tiny new accommodation, I’m thinking of my mother telling about moving day at their house when she was a little girl a hundred years ago. It was the nineteen-teens, maybe even 1915. Mama had been born north of Pensacola just up the road a piece, south of Century, in a rural area called Bluff Springs. It's hardly even on the map. Mama was the second of eventually five children. My sister is the family genealogist and would know when, but at some point they moved into Pensacola, where mama's father Walter Henry Gentry was in business with his brothers Lee and Elbert, Gentry Bros, Loans and Pawns. I don’t remember Uncle Lee; but I do remember Uncle Eb, who died in the 1940s when I was twelve or fourteen. In fact, I found Uncle Eb's grave in St. John Cemetery as I drove through Pensacola on my way to one of my spiritual retreats the summer of 2013.

Moving from Bluff Springs to Pensacola, the Gentry family rented a house in East Hill, on E. Strong Street. Mama said that after they'd lived there a while, the house directly across the street at 1317 came for sale, and my grandfather bought it. From what she told me, apparently moving day was one single day. Mama remembered a circus of relatives and neighbors rushing out of the old house carrying furniture and clothes across the street to the new house. It was done in short order.

Some years after Linda and I were married, my grandparents bought a new house at the corner of Ash and 9th Street. But my most wonderful memories are of the house and family and neighborhood on E. Strong Street. My fascination that, unlike us in Panama City, they had a paved sidewalk, and it went all the way round the block. I learned to skate and ride a bike there. I loved my cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents there. I may have learned to love cars there, my grandfather being a Chrysler man (as Ralphie’s father was an Oldsmobile man) who had two cars, one for himself and one for my grandmother, and every year traded in the older one for a brand new one. I learned to love fried chicken and corn pudding there. Rice and gravy, thick, salty brown gravy, quail and dove panfried in thick brown gravy. Sour cream pound cake. With my cousin Bill, sneaking out a Chrysler to drive it at high speed through East Hill streets on nights our grandparents went out to play cards with friends for the evening. It was, to me, the place of being loved. It’s just a block off Cervantes, and when in Pensacola, I almost always drive by and remember. A place of having been dearly loved.

Our move here is very different. Though also moving “just down the street” and just as loved, we have been sorting through generations of things in a century-old house. Deciding, tossing, deciding, selling, deciding, keeping, boxing, moving. It’s been weeks, months, and still isn’t done. The Gentry family did it in one day.