No Degrees of Separation
It’s Tuesday around 12:30pm. I’m eating lunch at our kitchen table, taking a break from the upstairs home office, when Copper, the feline matriarch of our clowder, settles herself beneath my chair, farts, and growls disdainfully at Bumper, who’s at the water dish rehydrating. He ignores her and she walks away, the kitchen now sufficiently cat crop-dusted.
Not twenty minutes later, a red tailed hawk slams into the living room window and drops into the mulch, talons pointed skyward. Patrick was on the phone trying to sort out some banking business and let fly a string of expletives in the ear of some poor but patient associate. I threw on my flannel jacket and grabbed one of our walking sticks on my way outside, thinking I could gently flip the bird right side up, but from a safe and respectful distance. It worked and, back on its feet, the hawk—a young’un—stumbled drunkenly through the cold flowerbeds in front of the kitchen windows to the back door and stood trying to collect his dignity. I sang to it, a sweet Lakota lullaby I know, until it flew shakily into the meadow for a restorative perch on the branch of a shagbark hickory. Meanwhile, back inside the house, all four cats were on full alert, watching the drama unfold through the window like a row of ducks at a shooting gallery line-up.
My life sure has changed since I started working from home.
For nineteen of our twenty years here, pre-pandemic, we’d leave the house in the morning to work elsewhere and not return for hours, the cats and chickens in charge of our belongings. I shudder to think of the elaborate capers that escaped our scrutiny as we labored miles away, unawares. I remember one day being sick at home on our old couch; I looked up at the ceiling fan to see a small squirrel sprawled across one of the paddles. Our cat at the time, Scout, was sleeping on my stomach and when I woke him up and pointed upward, he looked at me, shrugged and fell back asleep (I suspect there was some sort of Arrangement going on here, and I just happened to be home to witness it). Suddenly, the squirrel leapt from the fan blade, skittered down the wall and across the kitchen floor, sprinting to the mudroom. I had to pick Scout up and carry him there so he could at least pretend to give chase (sigh…some cats are born to their purpose, others have to be held by the paw the whole way).
We’d come home on occasion to find a few upended plants sitting askew on the carpet in a scattering of their once-tidy potting soil, but the rest of the kittens’ unsupervised deeds remained dark and unpunished. They still hide the evidence well, putting on an irresistible mantle of innocence and purrs that not even Patrick can ignore. We feed them little salmon treat nuggets, stroke their scheming heads and let them sprawl on the couch until we’re displaced to the deck chairs on the porch. I try to recall the constellation of circumstances that brought our cat total up to four. In a small bungalow-style home, with winter’s breath on the windows, that’s about three cats too many.
Until last spring, the wall between my work and home life was tall and thick, and not as transparent. The twenty-two minute commute from the office door to our screen door allowed for a slow and final evaporation of any unfinished business that followed me from my desk to the car. By the time I parked and walked across the front porch, it was all about gardening and field walks and winsome kittens and, for a time, forty Boer goats spread out across seven acres wrapped in electric fence. Copier breakdowns, policy revisions and new hire orientations blurred into the background, waiting restlessly but contained until the next business day. Exhales were the rhythm of my breath until dinnertime, and isn’t that why we moved out here? I know my computer will outlive me, but the current bend in the creek near the Old Man sycamore and the pairs of bright red cardinals dancing in his branches may not, so I’d best get out there and be with it all, unfettered and free in mind and body.
It’s different now. Lines have been crossed, blurred and shattered out of safe necessity. On Mondays, I touch the corporate workspace for ease of making copies, a faster WiFi connection that works well for some of my more graphic-rich projects, and virtual meetings with colleagues on the other side of my office walls. When I leave at the end of the day, I put my wastebasket outside the door and step into the remainder of a workweek spent in the guestroom-turned-home office on the second floor of our 100-year-old farmhouse. Kittens become coworkers (though they’re productivity is hard to measure by usual business standards) and my commute is now a steep set of stairs with two landings and a window with a view to the south. This is wonderful, because I don’t have a window back at headquarters. But it still feels strange having emails come into the house that have nothing to do with chickens or our recent seed order. And there was that twinge of guilt at first when I’d skip the day’s shower because who’s going to know, right? I look in my closet, where a professional wardrobe hangs unemployed, on hold until it matters again how I look between 8am and 5pm. (out of courtesy for my coworkers, I leave the camera off for our virtual meetings. They know enough about me already).
Straddling two worlds that were once separated by the chasm of my work-life balance construct, I’m getting better at keeping a daily schedule framed by healthy starting and stopping points. The gentle click of the home office door closing behind me is the new exhale moment at day’s end. Whatever was left undone or in process will be there when I’ve finished breakfast the next morning, brushed and flossed my teeth and at least run a quick brush though my hair. I’ll take the current convenience of fixing lunch one floor below as a temporary luxury and the absence of a morning commute as retirement practice. We’ll be back in the office soon enough, bumping into each other at the copier and exchanging pleasantries as we pass in the hallways, reheating our lunches in the microwave and receiving visitors in the lobby whose smiling faces we will happily get to see in full.
Until then, it’s occasional cat farts and a comfy clothes dress code and red tailed hawk rescues. I’ll make it work.
