John Mark Smith
One week in, I ripped down the paper shades, leaving a scrap still taped to the top corner of the window. Julien and various male roommates have been living in this house for three years now, and these temporary tissue paper pleats had hardly budged. “Why spend money on real ones when these work just fine?” they say. I roll my eyes.
Tomorrow, I’m settling into a new home, trading the 1930s University Hills cottage where I fell in love with Baton Rouge for a little tan house with red shutters and a big yard in Scott, Louisiana.
But in between the initial stay-at-home order and now, I’ve been holed up in my fiancé’s old roommate’s recently abandoned room in Lafayette, working on the Mac I (very carefully) hefted from our Baton Rouge office, which sits now on an economy folding table in between the office plants I took with it and my cat’s food bowl (which has to be placed on raised surfaces so that Julien’s lab doesn’t sneakily inhale it).
It’s disorienting, living and working in this in-between, and it has only made everything about the past two months feel more unreal, more separate. There is now a before, and there will be—one day—an after, and the stress and discomfort of the present moment will be forever emphasized by the groundlessness of not having home, when home is the only place we are supposed to be, and also of knowing that nothing will ever be quite the same.
Things improved significantly, though, once I tore down the shades. This little room, with its bare walls and the growing pile of moving boxes and bubble wrap, has a massive South-facing window. Beyond the computer screen, a cluster of trees spend the day swaying, and I’ve come to know the resident blue jay quite well. Natural light filters through the room, shifting shades as the sun moves me through my day. It reminds me of our office on Charles Street, the way the sunlight so filled each room that we almost never turned the electric ones on.
Moving to Scott also means that this work-from-home situation is in a large part permanent, so that even when our team is allowed to return to our office, I won’t be there nearly as often. The daily room-to-room banter, front porch lunch breaks, afternoon coffee: all more losses for this after.
So tomorrow, when I start settling into this new house, I’ll start with the office. I’ll set up the desk that has been in each of my bedrooms since I was a child, the wooden antique with my mother’s name etched into it. I’ll arrange my plants in every corner. I’ll fill the walls with the art and the knickknacks I’ve accumulated in my journey to here, and leave a little room for the pieces I still have yet to find. I’ll order a very chic office chair, and drape my grandmother’s hand-knit blanket over the back of it. And then I’ll sit and look out a new window, with new trees. I don’t think I’ll even bother with shades.
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