From USA Today

The Final Word: Just being older is sometimes the smartest move
By Craig Wilson, USA TODAY
E-mail cwilson@usatoday.com
Our next-door neighbors moved out over the weekend. They're a young couple, so they moved themselves. With the help of a few friends, of course.
I just watched from my living room window as they carried their sofa, their bed and dozens of boxes from the house, lugging it all to a U-Haul truck parked down at the corner. A lamp sat on the sidewalk. A mirror leaned up against the lamppost.
I'm glad I'm of an age now that I don't get called upon to help friends or neighbors move. There was a time in my 20s when it seemed as if I were moving someone somewhere at least once a month. And friends helped me move more than a few times, too.
I remember riding in the back of a friend's pickup as it barreled down the Adirondack Northway in a snowstorm, my sofa and chairs and kitchen table heading toward a new home. I sat on the sofa, clutching my shirts and ties and sport coats, hoping against hope my entire wardrobe wouldn't become litter, or worse, road kill.
As I said goodbye to my neighbors the other day, I commented that once people move, they always say they'll never move again. It's just too much of a pain.
I think women say the same thing about having babies, until they find themselves pregnant again. I guess they forget how hard it was the first time around.
I don't know that much about childbirth, but I've moved a few times in my day, and I know that's probably why I haven't moved in 23 years. I hope it's another 23 before I have to pack up again.
Maybe that's why my mom hasn't moved in more than 60 years, either.
College kids from Berkeley to Boston, however, will be moving in, out and all over the place next month and not think anything of it. Sometimes youth is not wasted on the young. It's actually an asset to be young and not know any better.
Newlywed actress Katherine Heigl was photographed moving herself into her new house recently. She's only 29. She'll come to her senses soon enough.
But maybe moving every few years is actually a good idea. You get to shed some possessions. Clean house, so to speak. Evidently that's what my high-school friend Sue must have thought.
Sue had a midlife crisis this winter. Actually, it was a late-life crisis, but better late than never, I always say. At least she had one. Shook things up a bit.
She quit her job, sold her condo and moved all her stuff into one of those storage shed complexes that have sprouted in suburbia.
She's old enough that she hired professional movers who showed up one day and emptied her condo in no time. Not a friend was called. Not a box was lifted. Not a bad deal.
She says she feels liberated — house-sitting is her newest pastime — and soon she'll take to the open road. Friends as far away as San Diego have been warned to get their sofa beds in working order. Like Billy Joel, she's moving out.
I'm tempted to join her. If only I didn't have to move.