Home

On Wednesday the studio sent everyone home. We'd seen it coming for two weeks, as the news got worse and the other companies around the lake emptied out one after another, and still when the email came it felt sudden. We had until the end of the day to pack up. I took my second monitor, my good keyboard, a plant that will probably die anyway, and the notebook I'd left in my desk drawer since Christmas.

The building was strange that afternoon. People were carrying boxes to their cars and making jokes about it being a long weekend, and nobody quite believed the jokes. Someone from facilities stood by the doors and told everyone who left to wash their hands and call their mothers, in that order. I did both.

My office now is the kitchen table. The monitor sits on three cookbooks I have never cooked from, which is the most use they've ever had. My chair is a kitchen chair, and by Thursday afternoon my back had filed a formal complaint. The window looks out over the street, and the street is very quiet. I can hear the crows. I didn't know there were so many.

Working from home is fine. That's the truth, and I keep saying it to people on calls, and it keeps being true. Meetings are just as long. The documents are the same documents. I get more done, actually, because no one can stop by my desk to ask a question that turns into an hour, and I miss that more than I expected. I'll write about that another time.

What I can't stop thinking about is my mother. She's sixty-four, she lives alone in the house in Duluth, and she has no intention of changing anything about her life for a virus she has only read about. She volunteers at the library two mornings a week, and they've told the volunteers to stay home, which she took personally. She goes to the grocery store every Saturday at eight, when it opens, and has done so for thirty years. I asked her to let me order her groceries for a while, and she said she'd think about it in a tone that meant she wouldn't.

I can't get to her. That's the part I keep returning to. Flying isn't something anyone should be doing right now, and driving is three days. If she got sick, there'd be no one in that house but her, and I'd be here at my kitchen table, sixteen hundred miles away, with my monitor on my cookbooks. I know she has neighbors. I know half of Lakeside owes her a favor. I know she's tougher than I am and always has been. I've called her every day this week anyway.

I don't have anything wise to say about any of this. I don't think anyone does yet. I'm washing my hands. I'm calling my mother. I'm learning which floorboards in my apartment creak when I pace, which is all of them.

How are you holding up, and who are you worried about?