I want that every Monday morning when I awaken to hear the garbage truck’s stop-and-go roar down our street and two neighboring streets, and accompanying clatter, followed by the intermittent wheeze of air brakes of the recycle collection truck, all of which takes more than an hour, intermingled with steady freeway noise from about ¼ of a mile away, and recurring airport noise from 2½ miles away, not to mention neighbors’ comings and goings, the endless yard and house renovation work of a close neighbor who seems to have a power tool fetish, and, inexplicably, sirens from the nearby fire station just about every morning, often at 7:30 a.m. Who is doing what in our neighborhood every morning at 7:30 that requires calling out the fire engines?
Yet—we stay. It is not like that all the time; Monday morning is the worst of it. We own the house with no mortgage. And we are a few minutes away from hospitals, police and fire services, freeways, shopping areas, and several kinds of transportation. Blessedly, we are also less than an hour from some of the most beautiful coastal and wooded areas of Northern California, as well as less than an hour from one of the world’s great destination cities.
It’s a tradeoff we make. People give different weights to different factors.