Apr 15, 2022 4 min read

It’s time to put on our shoes, fix up our hair, and head back into the world.

My co-workers and I got the news we’ll be returning to the office in a few weeks. It will have been 26 months since we last were all there together, waiting for elevators or bounding up the stairs, stopping in hallways to chat. Back on that strange day in March 2020, had someone told me it would be more than two years before we’d all be back in the building, I would have smirked.

Predicting that the shutdown would be short, I left my sweater hanging on my desk chair and a favorite coffee mug on the bookshelf. I figured I’d be back there in a few weeks, two months tops.

Two months and two years have passed. More than a hundred weeks. Two birthdays, two Christmases. A thousand miles on my bike. Hundreds of walks with my dog.

And I lived every bit of that looking like someone who really has nowhere to go, and nothing much important to do.

Give a girl two years of not having to dress up and that girl will melt into a personal style meant for comfort and for hiding. Except for the not-frequent days when I was out and about filming documentaries, I pulled my daily outfit from a floppy heap of stretchy things.

It was never much of a decision. Black yoga pants, sweatshirt, sneakers. I rotated between the orange, red and light blue sweatshirt and between two pairs of yoga pants, one of which must have kept floating to the top of the heap because after two years of almost constant wear, they were so holey they were too indecent even to wear around the house. I finally tossed them last week.

I did a trial work run this week, the way young children do a practice run before starting kindergarten. I’d get dressed and drive to the office, just like I did every day in the “before times.”

I stood at my closet for long minutes, reminded that there was a time the garments I wore hung from hangers. Dust had settled on the shoulders of my favorite jacket. Slacks folded over hangers were now creased beyond any ironing. My go-to cashmere sweater was pocked with little holes. The moths were busy these two years.

It was even trickier finding shoes. Wear nothing but slippers and old sneakers for, like, forever, and your feet will want to fan out some. Mine did. I kicked off the hard leather boot and then dug through the bottom of the closet for my newer sneakers.

During my drive there, I thought about what an adjustment I’ll face, working at a desk that’s just 20 steps away from my coffee maker or five steps away from my bathroom. I will not have Smoothie to keep me company, and I won’t be able to take that 20 minute mid-afternoon nap.

On the positive side, snacking will be curtailed. And after seeing my colleagues only from the shoulders up on the Zoom screen all this time, it will be refreshing to see the full-length version of them – arms and legs and walking about – and not having to enter a website to talk to them.

Those first days will be happy ones, but also strange. Maybe it will feel like that first day of school after the long summer vacation, when we reconnect with familiar faces. We may have to learn how to fit our lives back into the confines of an office and its hours.

I’m spiffing myself up to get ready.