A cube with a view

In another week or so, I will lose my wonderful big window at work.

My job is changing, and so I must move my desk. For the last four years I have had the best desk in the room--in the far corner, along a windowed wall, out of the way of most traffic. I have tons of storage, and I sit next to funny, smart and highly simpatico people.

But the window is the best thing.

I can sit at my desk and watch Twins fans streaming to and from the Metrodome on game days. I have watched a peregrine falcon fly in from the Mississippi River nearby and disembowel some small bird--a pigeon? a sparrow?--on the roof of our building. And then I've watched the feathers drift down.

I watch the weather; the wonderful violent rainstorms, the snow piling up, the sun beating down. In the winter, I watch it grow dark far too early.

I've been happy in that corner. I've done a lot of really good work.

My new desk is in the middle of the room, practically dead center, in an odd little dead-end in the rabbit-warreny features section. I will have plenty of space and quiet, which is what I need for my new job. I will have a window there, too. That window does not look outside, though; it looks into the office of the Managing Editor for Visuals.

I plan to put posters on the glass. I have several--one of the Superior Hiking Trail, one from an Impressionists exhibit that Doug and I saw in Montreal, and one from an exhibit we saw last year at the D'Orsay in Paris.

Any of those would be preferable to watching the Managing Editor for Visuals (or anyone) go about his daily tasks.

I'll like the quiet of the location. I won't be near anyone. I'll like the solitude. I think I'll do good work there.

And when it's raining, or when I want to check on the snowfall, or if when I'm feeling the need for a little sunshine, I can always walk back to my old corner. I'll say hello to my simpatico colleagues who I will no longer supervise, and we'll swap jokes and juice. And I'll look out my old window. It'll be there. Even if I'm not.