Next Wednesday will be St. Patrick's Day, exactly one year after the day when I -- wearing my green-striped scarf and shamrock socks -- walked out of my office "until after Easter break." I was gone for almost four months. Working from home became "WFH" and then "the new normal," and I eventually moved from the dining room table to the home office I'd been meaning to set up in the den. I had "work pajamas" and "sleep pajamas." I did laundry on my lunch breaks, threw random meals together in the crock pot, and pulled the cats out of the fireplace, the dishwasher, and the washing machine. Pulled all the weeds out of the front yard flowerbeds and finally did some landscaping. Pulled an orphaned (we thought) kitten out of the shed and her sisters out of the back yard six weeks later.
I didn't start writing in my journal, and I didn't write here, either. I doomscrolled, shopped online, picked up curbside, and learned to navigate Zoom, WebEx, and Microsoft Teams. I accumulated a variety of masks and a new phone. I stared at the phone a lot (more doomscrolling), stared at the computer screen a lot, and eventually bought blue-light filtering glasses that I still forget to wear. I broke my driving glasses and thought that it wouldn't really matter, because I wasn't ever going very far.
I went back to the office in July, amazed to find out that my air plant had survived four months of complete neglect. My feet ached from trying to wear "real shoes" after months of flip-flops and fuzzy socks. My heart ached from being alone in my office, still navigating WebEx and Zoom meetings, usually without video to save bandwidth since there were more of us in the same place even though we still couldn't see each other. I smuggled the kittens in, one at a time, to make things less lonely.
I got a job with the Census to fill my nights and weekends: counting people, counting steps and miles walked and stairs climbed in the 90-degree-heat and occasionally in the rain, and counting houses because I couldn't read the numbers very well in the dark with my broken glasses. I counted cases, tests, positivity rates, and deaths. I got tired of arguing about counting, not counting, and recounting. I counted myself lucky that I never got sick.
We had a Christmas tree with nothing breakable (because cats), so I pulled out the stack of cross-stitch ornaments that I made 20+ years ago from little kits that I bought in a clearance sale. We had 10 Christmas stockings (because cats, and also the dog).
I thought I would start writing in my journal with the new year, but the cats knocked it off my shelf, and I couldn't find the pen that I had clipped to the front cover in anticipation of starting to fill the pages. I told myself that I should I write about what it felt like to be living in a time when every day is "unprecedented." Part of me feels sure that I will always remember whether I write about it or not. Part of me probably just wants to forget, and that's why I didn't write.
So why am I writing here and now? I've spent the past two days sending a bunch of work emails, alternating between drafting long, carefully-crafted, meticulously-edited messages and trading snarky one-liners with my boss. When he complimented my writing, I replied that I've always been better at expressing myself in that way, as it doesn't allow my mouth to get ahead of my brain. I commented that maybe I should go back to blogging. So here I am.
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