EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about the emotions dredged up as we prepared to move my mother out of the house where my siblings and I grew up.

That move finally took place this week, and I can truthfully say that as the moving van pulled away from the stately white house in Warsaw, I wasn't overcome by deep and heartfelt emotions of leaving and loss.

I was much too busy focusing on a strained back, aching feet, tired hands, and leg muscles screaming for any sort of relief.

As anyone on the front line of a house-move can attest, there's no small challenge in emptying a house of corner cupboards, king-sized beds, massive dressers, sofas wider than doorways and freezers removable only up an impossibly steep set of basement steps.

Yep, moving the accumulated stuff of a lifetime ranks near the bottom on the Life's Fun Stuff list, just above a spinal tap and below getting an IRS audit.

For months before a move, most folks begin separating items to be moved from things to be sold, given away or sold in a yard sale.

Some people are able to exercise some restraint in what they take with them, but most are like us and have trouble severing emotional ties to everything from breakfast bowls to a child's first ice skates.

Those ties, in our case, led to more than 140 boxes filled with everything from flower vases (more than a dozen) to parfait glasses (more than two dozen) to knickknacks (many, many dozens).

While it was difficult for my mom to part with anything with memories attached--basically, everything in the house--it was easier for those of us moving it.

Whenever I was there packing, I made sure that when we packed one tea cozy, spatula or 30-year-old camera we tossed the four or five others just like it into the piles for trash or yard sales.

The most effective day I had packing was when my mom was packing up linens, leaving me and a crew of my son and his friends to pick through stuff in the basement.