In just a few weeks, I’ll end my two-year stint of working from home and return to the daily grind of having a job that actually requires I *gasp* leave the house.

I couldn’t be more excited.

Not only because I get to re-assert the much-needed separation between work & life (although, ironically, my new job is more in-line with my personal ethics/passions/ambitions/etc.), but because, in doing so, I get the joy of creating a work space — an entirely distinct and unique environment in which to spend my days. I realized this about myself when I started working from home: there are things that I will do in an office workspace that don’t work at home… for one reason or other.

For instance, I can have a plant, provided there’s adequate light, which I think there is. At home, plants are verboten because my kitties like to eat them & knock them over. …Of course, let’s not even get started on how much I’m going to miss spending my days with the wee bastards :-( …that’s a whole other matter.

The other thing I can do is set up my Magnetic Poetry stand… again, the wee bastards make this rather impractical for the home. I’m sure that I’d find all the little magnetic words scooped out of their little tray, to be eaten or strewn about the house, and all of my brilliant little magnetic poems destroyed.

But my favorite workplace design feature is to wallpaper the area surrounding my desk and computer with favorite poems. I started doing this at my very first job out of college, where I worked for a dreadful trade magazine. The office was about as lively as morgue (mostly because we were all so miserable we were silently praying for our own swift deaths). One day, I read the poem To My Twenties by Kenneth Koch — and it just made me so purely happy that I printed it out, so I could read it whenever I was feeling low (which happened regularly enough at that particular job I really needed to have a poem at the ready). When I left, after the longest 6 months of my adult life, I untacked the poem from the cubicle wall and took it with me to my next job.

I’ve had the same crinkly print out ever since. Over time, I’ve added several others — Well Water by Randell Jarrell, A Rescue by John Updike, Metamorphosis by Billy Collins, What the Living Do by Marie Howe, and more — each in various stages of crinkle, most with tears, all marred by several folded over pieces of tape, from being stuck and unstuck to my myriad workstations.

As uplifting as my “wallpaper” was, it’s problematic in my own home office. Ironically, the same scraps that have made me feel settled and inspired at work, make me feel sloppy and transient at home. Still, I’ve missed being able to just look at my wall and be transported by a good poem, the way a small framed photo can take you back to that moment when it was taken. I’ll be happy to get those little trips back.