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Our move this past weekend went very smoothly, aside from the funeral. While everyone in Manchester, MA was talking about the moving of a 4 bedroom house, we quietly drove the Penske truck to our  new apartment, unloaded and began nesting. And seriously, the apartment is on the third floor and has a good sized deck that is surrounded by trees. Sometimes it feels like we are nesting in a tree house. Anyway, things went very smoothly  with S and I having only a few "issues" over furniture and painting placement, many of which S solved by dragging me out to take a walk..oh and getting a cappuccino at the bike store, but more about that later. The only, umm, road block, was when we went to return the truck.

Have you ever driven rt 127 between Manchester and Salem? Or, say, the average New England road minus two feet and double the traffic? That was the road S. had to drive in a 22' moving truck. I did the navigating in the lead car. Things were going well until we came to Beverly Crossing, a small, town where main street is the street, and the parking lot. We'd driven through a few times before, and it hadn't seemed particularly busy but today seemed very crowded, both with cars and with pedestrians...strangely...all dressed in black. As we turned the corner at the top of the hill a crowd of black clad pedestrians had overflowed into the street and traffic came to a standstill. Looking over at the church to our left, the reason for all the activity was clear. We had driven into the biggest funeral ever held on the North Shore.

After about 12 minutes the crowd began to thin out and traffic began to creep. S. skillfully navigating among the people, Mercedes, suvs and Volvos. I began to think we'd make it through okay. And that's when we saw the other truck. A very big truck. In the other lane. I looked in the rear view mirror to see if somehow our moving truck had magically shrunk. It hadn't. Slowly the two trucks approached each other, passing each other only after one of the cars parked on the side had driven off, and they had pulled in their mirrors. It was a skillful piece of driving. As the driver of the other truck pulled along side S. he leaned out the window, casually asking, “Did the Pope die.”