Moving

My office will be moving at the end of next week. Since I began working at this place over 16 years ago, this will be the fifth space we’ve inhabited, and even if I’ve liked the space I’m in, as I do now, I always look forward getting a new work space. It feels like a new beginning, and even though I’ll be doing the same job and working on the same projects, it’s a nice time to say to myself, here is an opportunity to start fresh and approach my work with new resolve. We have already been given the keys to our new offices, and today, a relatively quiet Friday, I began moving some of my stuff to the floor below, into my new office. It’s nice to envision how productive I’ll be in the new space, and how clean and neat I’ll always keep it. I plan on softening the look of my office by adding a textile wall hanging and some trailing plants, like maybe a pothos near the window, which I envision growing with great lush profusion. Even though the new office is smaller and less sunny, I can’t wait for the new chapter in my work life to begin.

It’s a little sad, though, because I will never again spend my days sitting in that other office, where I so often talked to my mother on the phone, and so often talked to the health care providers who took care of her in her final months. Leaving that space means leaving that time, and moving further into the future and away from when I last saw and spent time with her. It makes me recall when I was living in a rented apartment on A Street, and my cat Libby died. Only a week or so later, my refrigerator konked out and could not be fixed, and instead of paying my rent that month, I went out and bought a brand new refrigerator. It was empowering, because my landlord was cheap, and normally obtained his appliances from some shady fellow who “reconditioned” old discarded ones and placed them in his rental units, often complete with a portable infestation of cockroaches. But that month, instead of sending him a rent check, I sent him the receipt for the fridge—and never heard a peep of protest from him. It should have felt great. Instead, it highlighted for me the fact that I could not hold back time, that I would be experiencing that brand new refrigerator without Libby, and thus would be beginning the part of my life that would go on without her.

Maybe it’s weird to compare the loss of my mother to the loss of my cat, but I think you know what I’m getting at. I kind of understand the impulse of those people you hear about who, after the loss of a loved one, never touch a thing in that person’s bedroom again. It doesn’t bring them back, though, and life does go on. What it says to me is that every day we are leaving the past behind and every day we can embrace fresh new beginnings—but perhaps we only really notice it when a goodbye and a hello happen at around the same time.

Even though my new office is smaller, it is configured differently, and is yielding up new places to hang pictures and place small decorative items designed to delight me as I move through my work day. I’ve thought about some of the photos of my mother as a beautiful young woman, and some even older archival items from my grandparents, that are among my mother’s effects, and I’m thinking maybe I’ll frame some of them. They’d look great next to that poster I have, circa 1917, exhorting new Clevelanders to come to the public schools and learn the language of America. Having those images in my office will remind me of who I come from, will make me smile, and will strengthen and nurture me. Even if I will never have spoken to my mother on the phone in my new office, I can bring her with me there, in those photos and in the heart of who I am every day.