The IKEA Throw Pillow Thriller, a (Moving) Moving Story

The view from the IKEA returns area (prior to the arrival of Throw Pillow Lady), plus my husband’s new iPhone.

Last week, my husband Cory took a day off so we could do a uniquely potent combination of errands: IKEA plus ketamine. IKEA is on the way to the ketamine clinic, so we stopped there first. I made the plan of attack that morning: Cory was to pick up the online orders I’d placed the night before, then make some returns while I rushed to the Marketplace section to evaluate the colander options.

The only snag was that we somehow ended up with a thousand extra FJÄDRARs (this is why I shouldn’t place IKEA orders after taking the max dose of melatonin) and, therefore, had to go through the returns line again. And this time, we were behind someone with four towering stacks of flat-packed office chairs to return.

Well, that wasn’t the only snag. The other snag was the woman who came in after me, while I was waiting to return my flock of FJÄDRARs. She held a single throw pillow and she, apparently, forgot to sign in. She didn’t realize this at first because she was looking at her phone, standing in the line that had formed just past the sign-in kiosk. 

Throw Pillow Lady figured out something was amiss after about twenty minutes, just as my name was called. She beat me to the returns counter and started chewing out the clerk, who politely but firmly refused to serve her until she checked in. Throw Pillow Lady started screaming.

“HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW I HAD TO CHECK IN?! NO ONE TOLD ME TO CHECK IN! I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR FORTY-FIVE MINUTES!! YOU WILL CALL A MANAGER RIGHT NOW AND YOU ARE NOT GOING TO HELP ANYONE ELSE UNTIL I GET MY REFUND.”

The manager came over, reiterated what the clerk had said, and added—with a knowing grin—that he could hear her screaming from the back room.

“Is this a pretty normal day for you?” I asked the clerk as she scanned my receipt.

“Oh, this is nothing. She hasn’t even thrown anything at me yet!”

I was relieved that the only thing Throw Pillow Lady had to throw was a throw pillow. She was still screaming when we left. I wanted to stick around to see what happened next, but there’s only one thing more exciting than someone making a scene at IKEA, and that thing is a strong dose of IV ketamine. 

The reason for the recent IKEA-ing is because we just moved into a new house. The story of this new house starts, as most of my stories do, with when I got chronic migraine disorder. My headaches began six months before all Facebook employees were required to abandon the Disneyland-like offices in favor of working from home amidst mutterings of novel coronavirus. So, I started holing up in our flat before it was cool. I guess you could call me a trendsetter.

Fast-forward to this past spring. The beautiful flat that we both adored was near to bursting at the seams. Between Cory’s home office and our dog’s attachment anxiety (plus both of their cases of sleep apnea), I struggled to find peace and quiet whenever I had a migraine. I also found myself despising the thing that made our neighborhood highly desirable: sunshine. Other parts of San Francisco are more well-known for a thick, gray fog that goes by Karl. Karl the Fog is like nature’s sunglasses, and sunglasses are essential for a photophobe like myself. 

I was also longing to spend more time with friends. That’s not to say our neighborhood was unfriendly, it’s just that our social circles had largely shifted away from where we were living. For someone with coworkers or family nearby, this isn’t a big deal. But for someone like me, who has zero qualms about answering the door while wearing pajama-wearing-dog-printed pajamas, it was rarely worth trekking across the city to see people for however long my body would let me socialize. Sometimes, I couldn’t even make it to a friend’s house before turning around to go back home. It was likewise not possible to always have my friends, who all have jobs and/or kids AKA actual lives, to come to me. This left me in a near-permanent state of MO—that is, FOMO without the FO.

But you can’t just up and move in San Francisco, even in the best of circumstances. Though many people left the city during the pandemic, those who decided to stay rushed to buy homes, and the market remained competitive. Plus, I had long since left my job and, with it, our second source of income. 

Cory was too discouraged to even seriously consider the prospect, though I did manage to drag him to an open house that just so happened to be across the street from some friends. As we walked through, I tried my best to envision the home without its dark wood paneling, musty shag carpeting, and water-damaged ceilings. What was harder for me to ignore was a strange smell that seeped from the walls, and the huge migraine I had by the time we left. (That house sold for over $1.4 million, and it’s now in the process of being completely remodeled.)

Though I’d always suspected that my migraines can be triggered by mold, I didn’t know for sure until that open house. As we visited a few other homes for sale over the following weeks, I found that I could detect mold almost instantly, either by smell, or by noticing an increase in head pain. (This is not my only superpower—my head can also be used to predict rainstorms with a whopping 50% accuracy.) 

A trend started to emerge: if a house was within our price range, it had mold.

This is when I started praying, sort of. 

(No, this is not going to be a Bible-thumping post. But, as Mary Karr said, “Nonbelievers, Read at Your Own Risk: Prayer and God Ahead.”)

Prayer was not a new habit for me. I’ve been convinced of the existence of God since hitting a rough spot in college and, after developing chronic migraines, Jesus Christ seemed more relatable than ever before. He is, after all, known for wearing a crown of thorns.

But a house was one of the biggest things I’d ever asked from God. Other things I’d asked for recently were to be healed of my migraines, and for Cory to get an iPhone. The latter did work out in my favor, which was great and all, but geez, talk about answering the wrong prayer! It’s like asking Santa to give you socks AND a new bike for Christmas, and getting only the socks.

So, when asking God not only to help us move, but to help us move into a house with no mold, I felt just a tad SUPER CYNICAL. I knew we couldn’t ask sellers to run air quality tests or mold inspections around here, not when we were competing with a dozen other people who would be sending offers with no strings attached. 

Two weeks after this half-assed prayer attempt, I was sitting on a bench encircled by cypress trees, listening to the sound of the ocean, which was only six blocks away. I was in The Sunset, San Francisco’s foggiest neighborhood—less than a mile from the $1.4 million moldy house—in the backyard of a couple who knew my pastor. They were also Christians, and they were about to put their house up for sale and move to the east coast. My pastor put us in touch, wondering if we could work something out.

This couple told me later that this first meeting was supposed to be our only meeting. They had everything in order to list their home in the fall, and they weren’t interested in doing anything non-traditional. I could see why—their home was beautiful, newly remodeled, and certain to sell for more than we could afford. However, they felt obligated to let us down easy by telling me “No” in person.

So there I was, sitting on the back patio of these two perfect strangers. They seemed nice, and I don’t get out much, so there may have been some word vomiting on my part. Headaches, loneliness, disability, mold, the sheer impossibility of everything coming together for us. They listened politely, I felt the catharsis of having a conversation with someone other than a doctor or my husband, and then, I left. 

But the following week, I was invited over again, and this time, they wanted to meet Cory, too. They’d been praying about it, they said, and they wanted to sell their house to us. They even offered us a price that was within our budget, less than what the home was worth.

“Wait to decide until you see how the mold inspections turn out,” they said. “We scheduled them for next week.”

“Do you think that lady managed to return her throw pillow?” Cory asked as we drove home from the ketamine clinic.

“I doubt it,” I said. “IKEA really brings out the worst in people.”

It was a rare clear day in The Sunset, but that was alright. Even I enjoy the occasional ray of sunshine. (The ketamine infusion I just finished likely also contributed to the alright feeling.) As we turned onto our street, the ocean stretched out before us, blue and glossy like a pane of stained glass hung on the coastline.

We’ve been walking to the beach every weekend and watching surfers ride the towering waves. Donut, the dog, rather dislikes the ocean, and sometimes has to be carried the last twenty feet, but he’ll come around eventually. We’re also a short walk from two of our closest friends, three if we’re counting Udo, the pygmy hippopotamus at the SF Zoo.

And Cory—Cory has taken to complimenting my eyes more often. He’s seeing them more now that I don’t wear sunglasses every day. (How he came around to the idea of moving is just as unbelievable/miraculous of a story, but alas, I’ve kept you long enough.) 

Gosh, I thought as we passed the cypress trees and pulled up to the house, I hope this view never gets old.

The view from our driveway, minus Karl the Fog.