3/28/2026

Time Is Different?

It has been while I have been helping my ex-wife move into her new house that I came to realize just how time can become ‘distorted’ for lack of a better term.

What am I talking about? Maybe it would be better to explain what happened as a better means of defining this.

A little over 7 years ago we sold our house – The Manse – after our divorce. She moved to a neighboring town and I relocated the The Gulch, a home literally on the other side of the hill where The Manse is located. When we decided to sell The Manse we went through everything we’d accumulated over a 13-year marriage. We threw away a lot of stuff there was a lot of things we’d ‘saved’ that we had no room for in our respective new homes. We split some things, with some of my family’s heirlooms remaining with me or going to my siblings. After we had whittled everything down we had some things left over that neither of us could take with us but that were important to us so we decided to rent a storage unit and placed the stuff we both wanted to keep inside it. From time to time over the past 7 years we’ve both removed old items and added new items to our stash.

Some time ago she informed me she wanted to move back to our town as she spent a good portion of her time in this town between shopping, hair appointments, dental appointments, gym workouts, and so on as it was. She really liked this town and missed it. It turns out I knew of a house that would be becoming available. To make a long story short she and her new husband ended up buying that house and are in the process of moving from her old place, one town over, to her new place just down the road from The Gulch. And here’s where the time distortion I mentioned comes into play.

It seems to me that it took only a couple of days to move stuff from The Manse to the storage unit seven years ago. We used the trusty RAM 1500 to move most of that stuff, making about a dozen trips to do so. However, it’s taken almost three weeks to move stuff from the storage unit to her new home, The Gulch, or BeezleBub’s house. At first, I thought that maybe I had misremembered the amount of time it took us to move our things from The Manse to the storage unit. But after asking both my ex and my son about this, I found their recollections matched mine. We have roughly the same amount of stuff we did when we filled the storage unit but it’s taking almost 7 times longer to empty it than it did to fill it. We’ve even been using the same trusty RAM 1500 to move the stuff.

What gives? Does this have anything to do with Relativity or Time Dilation?

I have no answer. It is a puzzlement.