Home Work in the Pandemic

Like so many, the pandemic has challenged and changed my professional life. Unlike so many, I am used to working from a home office. In fact, my home office was already established and “socially distanced” from my home. My commute takes me from my back deck, through my backyard and up some stairs to a bright and airy office above my garage. The office shelves bear a bounty of printer paper, index tabs and European notebooks waiting to be called in to service. With a mini fridge, minimal secretarial skills and a minuscule restroom, I need not venture forth into my domestic bubble until day’s end.

And yet.

My typical self-discipline and essential focus gave way to fuzziness with the onset of a pandemic. At first, the novelty, anxiety and a steep Covid-19 learning curve occupied parts of my day. As days passed, though, it seems I have not returned to my pre-pandemic stride. Bursts of my usual productivity and multi-tasking skills would be followed by a day with fewer accomplishments. I move forward through the work, but the gait is less rhythmic and the daily distance covered unequal.

This teeter-totter of uncertainty seeks balance in my always-home office. It must be even more difficult to achieve work equilibrium for those without a history of “working from home” or a designated work space. With my nest. I am fortunate.

For weeks I have meant to write down my thoughts on the fact and philosophy of working from home. I didn't put fingers to keyboard until now, nudged by the news of the unexpected death of Eavan Boland, a wonderful Irish poet. Her work appears in academic course work, anthologies and The New Yorker. A bit older than myself, her artistic voice and wonderful Irish face were part of a generation of strong Irish women: former Irish Presidents Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, novelist Edna O’Brien; vocalists Sinead O’Connor and Mary Coughlan; actors Fiona Shaw and Fionnula Flanagan. With these women and others, Eavan Boland articulated the myth and mundane in an accessible language. Her frames of reference were often Irish and domestic, yet described universal experience. Her more recent years were spent as a Creative Writing professor at Stanford—- my law school alma mater.

Ms. Boland’s poem, Quarantine, was penned about the Irish famine in the 1840s. It resonates with today’s public health crisis and the strength of the individual and family. May Eavan Boland’s words place our own work challenges in perspective, making us grateful for the ability to work from home and share in the warmth of our loved ones. I, for one, will continue to muddle through this uncertainty—- even if my stride isn’t always graceful and swift. Thank you, Ms. Boland.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season

of the worst year of a whole people

a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.

He was walking- they were both walking-north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.

He lifted her and put her on his back.

He walked like that west and north.

Until at nightfall under freezing starts they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.

Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

There is no place here for the inexct

praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.

There is only time for this merciless inventory.

.

Their death together in the winter of 1847.

Also what they suffered. How they lived.

And what there is between a man and a woman.

And in which darkness it can be best proved