Published April 5, 2020

When I moved to Washington after living in Oregon for nearly three years, I wanted to find an apartment with a view of a mountain. Who wouldn’t? I was going to be working from home as part of a remote editing team, which meant being home for 40 more hours a week. What I didn’t want was a place where it might be easy to forget that I was in the Pacific Northwest. I didn’t want it to seem like I could still be in flat Louisiana.

My apartment in Oregon didn’t offer much of a view that made the difference clear, except when it snowed, which was not as often as a Southern girl had expected. So I shopped around before moving to Vancouver USA, my heart set on a mountain view. That’s the name of the first neighborhood I looked in — Mountain View — with no luck.

One day, I got a call from an apartment manager who knew what I was looking for, and she said there was a unit coming open with a glimpse of Mount Hood. I took it. It was a tiny glimpse, the tip of the mountain, and you had to remember where to look for it. Within a year, trees across the road had grown to the point where Mount Hood’s peak would soon be obscured. Rent was about to go up quite a bit (which would become a regular thing throughout the county), so I moved to a different apartment.

The new place had an apartment coming open in the back of the complex. No great view, but there was a small field with a playground area for kids, the manager said, and it was hardly ever used. It’s very quiet, was her point. Neither proved to be true. Kids played back there a lot, and at night, young adults gathered back there to drink beer, smoke and look up at the sky.

The back side of a sound wall between the property and a state highway that winds its way past it was a part of the view, but when it snowed, it was a wonderful little park to look at. Maybe one day I will post photos of how the snow-covered branches looked hanging over my deck, incredible photos that needed no filter to look spooky and gorgeous at the same time.

And, as I had done in Oregon, when I lived across the street from a huge evergreen tree, I photographed the ones near my building at this apartment complex and told friends back in Louisiana, “Everyone up here gets our own Christmas tree as part of the deal living here!”

I was no longer working much at home, having been laid off from the remote-editing job four months after moving to Washington. Six weeks later, I was back in a newspaper newsroom five days a week. What little editing I did at home was freelance assignments I’d picked up on the side to make some extra money. When I was at my computer doing that work, I could see the trees that you see above when I looked out the window leading out to the deck.

I moved again in April 2018 because of yet another rent increase and, after my car was totaled, I wanted to try to find a place close enough to the newspaper office that I would have the option of walking to work. Such a place came open, and I grabbed it.

Because it’s next to Interstate 5 and most of my windows face a field, an offramp and a feeder road, the views are generally less than stellar. But the price is good, I love my neighbors, and I have a wonderful walk-in closet for my beautiful wardrobe.

There is a view that I’m enjoying quite a bit lately. When I began working at home again after the newspaper set us up with remote-work capabilities, I happened to mention on Twitter that because of an ongoing neck problem, I have to turn my head to the right regularly to give my neck a break. I posted a photo of the lovely tree outside the window near my work setup. A Twitter friend quickly responded after seeing that photo. She wrote: “Put a Post-It on that window that says ‘Hi, Beautiful’ so I know I said hi.” So I did. (There’s a story in the works for sometime this week that may or may not include a reference to this photo and its origin story, and perhaps feature the photo as well.) I suggested similar Post-It notes for friends of mine who are also working at home, hoping to start a movement. Can we keep this going? I’d like that very much. Hey, give it a try! Make someone’s day! This gesture makes my day every day of the week. I even put a first draft (!) of the Post-It note, without the smiley face, on my computer monitor!

But in the basement of our building today, doing laundry for several hours, I was thinking about how dreary it is down there. Part of the lower level is below ground, so your face is roughly at ground level as you are looking out a window on that level.

I put some camis and other tops on hangers while the rest of my clothes dried, and when I went to retrieve them, I looked out the window, ready to be unimpressed again. There is rocky soil, a chain-link fence and, for now, a shuttered cinema behind our building. That’s what you see looking out the laundry-room window.

Just as I began pulling clothes out of the dryer, a bird flew past the window, slowly, in no hurry — or, did time, a concept that I am grappling with as never before, stand still while the bird was in flight? I found myself suddenly grateful for the sunny day, for the gift of seeing a lovely creature enjoying it, and grateful that I still have a job (for now), a place to live (for now), and beautiful clothes that have helped me so much during my journey of learning to love myself. It was an unexpected moment of grace.

My next realization is what inspired me to write this blog post.

I have my mountain, I heard myself say. The mountain has come to me.

It has come to all of us.

This coronavirus pandemic that has claimed tens of thousands of lives worldwide and changed the lives of billions on the planet, this COVID-19 outbreak and all of the challenges we now face because of it — this is a mountain, the biggest of my lifetime.

This is where I run out of metaphors.

Hang in there with the hunkering down, lovelies. We need you.

Photo of a path with a mountain in the distance by kavram/via Shutterstock.