After six years of waking up every morning and wishing it would happen, I am

finally going to have a movement.

I'm sure you can imagine what it is like to have lived for so long waiting for something like that to happen. The emotional distress alone has been incredible.

Six years ago, when I had my last movement, it resulted in a considerable reduction in my personal space. It was quite spectacular, in a disturbing sort of way. I'm hoping this next movement will reverse a lot of the effects of that last one,.

The worst part is that every time I have a movement it gets more expensive. This one is probably going to cost close to half a million. My first, back in 1975 was less than forty thousand.

Clearly, inflation has had a significant impact on my movements.

Of course, I am not talking about the kind of movements that cause nurses come into your hospital room and ask you if you've had one today. I mean the kind where you have to change addresses.

We've decided to find a new home.

Six years ago, we thought we had an empty nest. Diane was about to make a major career change, and we had a large house and yard to take care of.We decided that it would make sense to move into a condominium apartment. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The same can be said for the idea to develop an atomic bomb.

I have hated living in an apartment since the second day here. I was too busy unpacking on the first day to think about it, otherwise I probably would have decided that I hated it on that day, too.

I am not an apartment person. My favorite house was one we owned in the 1970's that had three acres of land and was surrounded by hundreds of acres of open farmland. Outside our apartment is a deck that is approximately four one-thousandths of an acre, surrounded by other equally spacious decks.

In the apartment, at any time of the day or night, there are other people living immediately beside and above us. Thankfully we're on the ground floor, or there would be people below us, too. I have never felt like there is even the remotest iota of solitude anywhere around here. I hear their music, televisions, and conversations.

For a few years we also heard the upstairs neighbor whenever she was having a really good time. She had a really good time just about every night, and could probably be heard all over town and by all the ships at sea. We started sleeping with industrial strength earplugs, but she could still be heard just a bit muffled.

Thankfully, she had a movement a couple of years ago.

Making the decision to sell your home sets off an unusual chain of events. The first things you think of doing are a whole series of the changes to the place to make it seem more desirable. In the few days since we made the decision to move, our lives have been consumed with doing just that.

I mustered up all of my limited handyman skills and fixed the crack in the plaster where the wall jumped out and tripped one our alternately occupying sons when he came home from a party at least two, if not three, sheets to the wind.

We've rented a second off-site storage locker to put some of the larger pieces of our furniture away until after the place sells. That way it will seem much bigger to anyone who comes for a viewing.

We even went out and bought a futon for the son who currently occupies the bedroom that was supposed to be my office. His old bed took up over half the room. That way it will look like you could actually swing a cat in there, should any potential buyer have a penchant for cat swinging.

I've never tried flinging a cat, but I bet that sounds just like the former upstairs neighbor, when she was having a really good time.

2006, Gordon Kirkland