San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
OUR DREAM HOUSE IS SLOWLY TAKING SHAPE
Buzz around the novel coronavirus was already thick when we visited friends while they house-sat in March 2020, but the threat still felt far away and unlikely to affect us. The beautiful home in question, however, especially its extensive gardens and the chicken house in the back, was very tangible and had the immediate effect of making us green with envy. It was a real suburban homestead — the kind of setup that screamed simplicity, but in coastal California, required serious wealth or extraordinary circumstances to achieve.
Mark and I had property on our minds, and we were banking on extraordinary circumstances. While we had, in our five years together, grown from indebted and disillusioned young adults into secure and modestly successful 30-somethings, the over-picked housing market anywhere near our offices in La Jolla and Encinitas was laughably outside our budget.
Something had to shift in our careers or the market to make our dream possible. We just had no idea how all-encompassing that shift would be. As it turned out, that envy-inspiring visit was our last social outing for months to come. California’s shutdown began the following week, and, like the rest of the world, our day-to-day lives changed dramatically. We both became remote workers, and though the
longevity of the scenario was unknown, we decided to act.
It was Labor Day 2020 when we moved into our new home in La Mesa, further south and east than we ever could have tolerated as commuters. Sometime between termite tenting and our arrival, both the garage door and the air conditioning had busted. It was a hot, sweaty move. At day’s end, our elderly dog, Juno, plopped down in the middle of a little lawn area and looked back at me.
“We made it,” her expression seemed to say.
The collection of potted herbs and vegetables and the vertical worm farm we brought with us from our north-facing apartment balcony, where we’d painstakingly “farmed” with artificial light and irrigation kludged from the washer hookup, practically disappeared in the new expanse.
We had big plans for the property. A south-facing patch of hard-packed clay that had been used for vehicle storage would be the main garden with 16 raised beds. We’d put the chicken coop behind that and rebuild the decrepit, ratinfested shed into a workshop. We even dreamed of goats.
Plus, if the dang virus could ever be controlled, we knew we had the perfect property to throw the wedding of the century.
“It will span three days,” Mark would say. “On the first, we roast a whole lamb. On the second, a whole pig. On the third, a cow.” I imagined something like a festival with games, entertainment and activities arranged throughout the yard, and live music playing in the sunroom. Of course, being realists, we knew it would probably be 2021 by the time we finished most of our intended projects and could begin event planning — these things take time, after all.
We laugh at that timeline now. We eloped two days before Christmas 2020 outside the county courthouse at “The Marriage Hut,” a COVID-19 era conversion of Waterfront Park’s snack bar.
Now, in early 2022, we’re still finishing some of those first projects and haven’t even begun preparing for goats. We do have nine 4-foot-by-6-foot raised beds, and we have successfully revamped “The Rat Shed” into “The Rad Shed.” We built a “chicken cathedral” that houses two very spoiled Blue Australorp hens who should begin laying any day now and who our 3-year-old neighbor visits daily. On Valentine’s Day of 2021, we had to bid farewell to our little terrier, who I’d adopted when I was just 20, as she departed from her earthly existence. We took solace in having a scenic plot — now Juno’s Garden — so that we could inter her where she would always be close, and after a period of grief, we adopted two more four-legged knuckleheads who will be joined by a human baby brother in May.
Every project on our tiny homestead, which we recently dubbed “Many Paths Ranch,” seems to take about three times as long as we plan, and to spawn 10 more related projects. Perhaps it is the way of a dream to manifest slowly, so that each moment can be savored. I recently opened my journal for the first time in ages and read the previous entry, dated Dec. 15, 2020. It read, “I wonder if it’s advisable to be happy. It feels a bit illicit. Yet here I am.”