Back in time

 I've been working from home since mid-March. I brought my work computer home to the big corner desk in the back room that has served as my work space since we bought this house 35 years ago. 

It was a last-minute decision on that last day before the church building closed and all of us -- school students, teachers, staff -- retreated to homes and screens and Zoom. It was drizzling, so I pulled my car up to the church door and wrapped the iMac in my fleece jacket before carrying it out the door and laying it on the back seat. 

At home it took the place of an older Mac, one whose operating system had been regularly updated, most recently past the point where it could handle all it was being asked to do with practical speed. And I settled into the work-at-home space where I had spent many, many late-night hours a couple decades ago,  dog sleeping under the desk, humans asleep in bedrooms nearby.

I shopped for that desk, a big one designed for a corner, for months, and brought it home and assembled it all by myself. It's veneer on particleboard with a wide and very sturdy keyboard shelf. The box must have been a heavy lift up the back steps. 

The desk faces into a corner with windows to the right and book shelves on the wall above. The chair came from a garage sale  -- a heavy office chair with shiny squared-off metal arms and a brown seat. After a couple tries I got the height just where I wanted it and added a flat pillow (also from a garage sale) that shortens up the seat. The chair is worn and lumpy and mine. I sprawl this way and that across it at least as much as I sit up the way you're supposed to.

All this is nothing but a lead up to writing about going back into my office at church the other day (Wednesday, to be exact, the day the mob invaded the Capitol).  It's always strange to be there, like walking into a museum exhibit of my past, frozen in time. Last spring's choir music is still in a folder on my desk. The bulletin board holds bits and pieces of life through last winter -- but nothing newer. There's still a box of odds and ends that I'm not sure what to do with and another odd collection of clippings and things I mean to bring home. 

Back at my house, in the morning sun, I can see dust -- on the floor under the dining room table, on the piano, on the lower shelf of the old washstand that serves as an end table. There's a Miss Fabersham quality to parts of the house -- things that have stayed frozen in time since last March -- just as there is to my office at church. 

Waiting for a new era.