I have a home office, the kind of workspace everyone covets but few actually use.
It’s been nine years since I set out to turn the third bedroom of my 1959 ranch into my home-away-from-the-newsroom home.
I found a vintage office desk at EcoStores for $20 — something from the days of “Mad Men,†with skinny chrome legs that people with too much money on the East Coast paid hundreds to own.
I snagged an office chair covered in mustard-colored vinyl from the Lincoln Journal Star library, a place once staffed by a half-dozen story clippers and filers and populated with reporters in search of stories on Bob Kerrey or Alice’s Restaurant.
During the pandemic, I’ve been a mobile reporter, moving from my couch to my kitchen table to my patio, laptop in one hand, cellphone in the other.
People are also reading…
I’ve put my feet up.
I’ve spilled watermelon juice and coffee and cornbread crumbs on my keyboard. Developed a case of carpal tunnel from the odd angles.
Now, after more than 120 days working at home from the north Lincoln bureau of one, I have finally decided to sit in my office.
At my desk for the remainder of this strange summer.
Remember the old days? We were going to be at home for two weeks! Maybe two more! By mid-April. By May.
We’d reconnect with what was important. Bake bread. Read more books. Check, check, check.
The novelty of home is beginning to wear thin.
The mornings in pajamas. The after-lunch teeth brushing. The rotation of work week clothing. The T-shirts, the yoga pants. The T-shirts, the yoga pants. The T-shirts.
When the pandemic began its march to the Midwest in March, I’d just returned from Arizona. Three cases of COVID-19 had been confirmed in the Phoenix area, and I held my breath in the elevator of the Airbnb apartment we’d rented near the Arizona State University campus in Tempe.
Monday of this week, the desert state had recorded 163,841 COVID-19 cases and 3,315 deaths. By Tuesday afternoon, a hundred more deaths and 2,000 more cases. By Wednesday morning, 168,273 cases and 3,466 deaths, all part of a downward trend from the week before.
In the meantime, Vietnam closed the Da Nang airport for 15 days after 14 cases of the coronavirus were discovered in the city.
One country means business; this one wants business. I’m not sure we can have both, at least not the way it was, not for now.
It all hurts.
I’m quarantining from family members who may have been exposed and are waiting for test results. I’ve interviewed people who have lost dear ones to the virus. I feel the pain of parents — and teachers — struggling to navigate safety in schools.
I miss hugging my parents. I miss picking up peaches and putting them down in the produce aisle.
But I feel patriotic, shopping for hex nuts at the neighborhood hardware store wearing my camouflage mask.
I’m proud of my mayor.
My heart swells in the grocery store aisles to see my masked brothers and sisters, and I’m baffled by the dissenters who see a swatch of cotton as a slippery slope.
To what? Our safety?
The truth is, most of the time, my life is perfectly lovely.
I have a job. Money in the bank. My kids are healthy.
My fridge is filled with watermelon and cantaloupe as big as a grown man’s head, grown in Nebraska.
If I eat any more sweet corn, my entire body will turn to starch.
I’ve planted zinnia seeds and watched them grow waist-high, covered in swallowtails and monarchs, as delicate and divine as a stained-glass window.
From the window in my office, I can see rabbits slip under my fence — like Peter without his jacket — and leap across the field beyond my backyard.
I’m expecting an animated Snow White soon, trilling a happy song to the bluebirds alighting on her fingers while she waits for seven small men to return expecting a hot supper.
There’s always a bad guy — or a wicked witch — in a Disney movie or a Grimm Fairy Tale.
There’s always someone lying in wait to lure us in with a shiny apple or a sharpened spindle hidden in a basket of yarn that will cast us into a deep sleep.
It’s still unclear who the prince might be in this version of our dark fairy tale. Or if he can work his charms.
The foreverness of this time will one day wash away, like the memory of our grandparents’ voices. It will leave us (we hope) stronger, kinder, more prepared.
We will wonder how so many of us accepted 150,000 deaths — and counting — with a collective shrug or with a rant about liberty or an amnesia about the words of a president, predicting all of this would just magically go away.
What a strange world we live in.
When I check my work voicemail — a phone that rings at a downtown desk I can scarcely recall — callers often remind me to change my message.
It’s one I recorded right before a winter vacation: “I will be out of the newsroom until December 16.â€
The reminder from readers makes me laugh, because right now that sounds about right.
And from my perch in my office at home, maybe a tad bit optimistic.