On July 1, we move.

Reflections on a non holiday.

It’s 10:51 pm. A moving truck has pulled up beside my window, about eight feet from where I sit. It’s idling and the vibrations are causing an oven to rattle against a bed frame. This isn’t a terrible time to move: it’s quiet. It’s cool. And it’s June 30 — the night before Quebecers throw their appartments into the air and accept to live in whatever they manage to catch as the appartments all fall back to earth.

There is something marvellous about walking through the streets of Quebec City and happening on dozens of people with their lives splayed out on the sidewalk (marvellous perhaps because I haven’t moved in 12 years and have no plans to.) I think of a friend who I once ran into while he was moving in Toronto. His most secret items tossed haphazardly in a box were at my feet. I looked down and saw his copy of 50 Shades of Grey. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, uncomfortably standing there as we examined the boxes, undressed him with our judgement. I’m sure he would have felt better if he was among thousands of others whose lives were also in boxes at passersby feet. His life would have blended in.

On the streets, the line between garbage and treasure blurs. A lamp that looks perfect pokes out from a desk that looks like a bomb was dropped on it. Couches are dismantled. Chairs are piled up on top of chairs. Mattresses abound for Royal Rumbles. I came across one woman sleeping on a leather couch. A plush red velvet recliner that has been on the sidewalk up from where I live for three days has already attracted more chairs — notably, an upside down white wicker chair that someone has balanced on top. Are these garbage? Or are they just waiting for July 1 to be scooped up by a patient owner?

If moving is primarily on display than consumption plays a supporting role. Junk, Garbage. Cheap furniture. Plastic, dump-bound stuff. Broken and bent furniture that is too heavy to move and too easy to toss out.

Groups of young men drive cube vans wrecklessly throughout the streets. No one cares about parking laws. Orange signs are placed everywhere telling people to not park here for some number of hours on July 1. Neighbourhood Facebook groups light up with messages like, “my moving truck is coming in 30 minutes, whoever owns this car can you please move it?” It’s officially moving day.

Today, a mattress that has never seen sunlight is strapped naked to the roof of a Honda civic and driven through town, its middle browned and its edges, yellow. Today, chairs roll by my window, tied down in the back of a pick-up, as if the bandits who had been tied to those chairs had narrowly escaped being run out of town. Today, a bucket brigade of financial boxes are being passed from arm to arm as a family moves in their youngest daughter and sister.

You can imagine that this society timed rental leases to coincide with July 1 so that Quebecers would not be tempted to enjoy Canada Day. And maybe that was some of it. But Quebec’s civil code necessitates that leases are given a common day to expire. For centuries, that fixed day was April 30 (indeed, anyone who knows anything about farming would know that kicking people out of where they live on July 1 would be a silly thing to do). But in 1973, Robert Bourassa changed the law, aligning leases to expire on July 1. The argument was that by changing moving day to July 1 from April, kids would be finished school — a solid argument that just happened to coincide with a holiday that no one here cared to celebrate.

Besides, we just had a long weekend. July 1 is for moving.

Good luck getting a truck or renting a car. Already, I’ve seen a bread cube truck carrying a living room and a man. I’ve seen an RV with BC plates packed tight with someone’s life. Where pianos used to hang from pulleys as men hauled them onto a third floor balcony and into an apartment, today, the largest and most fragile items are televisions that are scientifically big enough to erase your own life as you stare at it. Attach a 70-inch TV to a pulley, haul it to the third floor balcony. At one point, a family of six lived there. Today, the couple can’t afford two.

Collective suffering creates collective identity. Moving is suffering but when everyone else is moving too, that’s not so bad. The times of docks and fires and concerts was last week. Today, you help a friend move.

But maybe, at the end of the day, you draw the shortest straw and find yourself out on the street. Our rent isn’t suppoesd to be this high.