Shortly after the pandemic forced a shift to remote work, I found myself spending longer than normal hours at the desk that typically would be where I craft my novels; after a few weeks of trying to do my day job on a personal MacBook that had never been intended to be treated as a development workstation, in late March of 2020 I made an emergency trip to the office and retrieved my full-sized desktop with it’s glorious 27″ screen for what I naively assumed would be just a few weeks of working remotely. I’ll save the fear I felt over making that trip despite knowing the building would be a deserted ghost town for another entry; we knew so little about COVID-19 in early 2020 that it felt as though each breath we took was suspect.
Setting up the desktop at home required some rearranging and no small amount of creativity; while my home office setup was by definition cozy, I’d never thought about what others would see when we began holding all of our meetings virtually, not to mention just how much of a luxury the space in my office actually was. You can see from the photo of my feline helper that what little counter remained after adding the massive desktop had to be shared in ways that I would never have considered before.
And yet, as those weeks turned to months, and then months turned into a year, I found that having those special helpers with my in that cozy little home office — along with the rest of my family — turned out to be integral in getting through the worst of what the pandemic offered. We’ve always been pet owners, my wife and I, and while we’d long enjoyed their companionship, it took on a completely new meaning as we weathered the shelter-at-home together. Taking care of them became just as important as the rest of our family, and took enough of a focus that we could convince ourselves, albeit briefly, that the world hadn’t gone completely topsy-turvy.
There were challenges, of course; Satchel, our burly adoptee from the county shelter developed a urinary tract infection that triggered his just-hiding-beneath-the-surface diabetes, sending us to the emergency vet. We quickly found that they, too, had been overwhelmed by the pandemic; spending hours in a the parking lot under the blazing Tucson sun, masked up and social distancing with the vet so I could learn how to do insulin shots is not an experience I ever hope to repeat.
Which of course we did. Tigger (pictured above) was a senior citizen when the world closed down in March, 2020, and had the insane timing of becoming a diabetic herself just as Satchel got his under control; for her, it was the first of many challenges that ultimately proved too hard for her to overcome this past Christmas. I look at this snapshot now with fond memories of how she used to hop onto my desk and snuggle in between the edge and the monitor, blithely unconcerned about sitting atop a project document or being on camera for a meeting. I never moved her, of course; I figured after being with us for nearly twenty years, she deserved to lounge wherever she saw fit.
I miss both her and Satchel; it’s been six months now since we lost them and I still see them in the shadows, or I’ll run across a cat toy that rolled under something and only recently resurfaced. Rocket still looks for them, too, though not as much as in the early days. After having had so many fur babies underfoot and their requisite activity, just having a single dog somehow makes life seem quieter now (which it isn’t). Either way, the gift of unconditional love they gave at just the time when we needed it the most is one that I will continue to treasure.