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From the Other Side of Tolerance
During the pandemic, people had to make decisions about who was worth risking spending time with. We rarely made the cut.
The day I realized we need to move out of our San Diego home, I ordered four new pieces of furniture. Not little decorative stools or night stands that you can stack on top of boxes, but four solid wood cabinets that would require two or three movers to carry back out of the house and occupy valuable cubic feet in the moving van. One towered four feet tall, requiring anchoring to the wall for safety.
“Isn’t it crazy to order new furniture now, when we’re thinking of moving?” asked my husband.
“Yes,” I said. “But I’m not leaving until we have lived in it fully, as we had planned.”
Ever since we moved into our newly built home four years ago, we had been meaning to fill the space flanking the oversized Cantina glass doors to our travertine-tiled patio with an expansive view of the Pacific Ocean. We had also been planning to replace our sticker-covered Ikea bookcases that we had temporarily put in the office and the main bedroom to hold my ever growing stash of books. Suddenly, these long procrastinated purchases became top priority.
We had been content enough living in this house throughout the pandemic. On a half acre lot, we have a pool and a generous yard for our children. In the early months, we put in a garden where we grew the sweetest tomatoes, an abundance of beets, and crispy spinach and snap peas that my daughter harvested to make her own salads. When the tae kwon do classes went online, our kids were able to airplay the Zoom classes on our large TV screen in our media room and follow Grandmaster Kim’s various kicks and forms. When I started seeing clients virtually, the music and chatter from our children’s online classes did not invade my corner office downstairs.
We live in a coastal town that has received national attention for its livability and sense of community. Almost everything we need is within a two mile radius from our house, including newly-rebuilt, top-rated schools, a Boys & Girls Club with an Olympic-sized pool, and the county library. We can walk to the beach where the kids can boogie board, play in the sand, and eat…
