After more than thirty years of messy mountains of paper and a general atmosphere of disarray in our common home-office, Dave and I have separated – desks. In the end it wasn’t a difficult decision. It had been coming for a long time. Lord knows I tried to keep the inflow of paper in check, sorting them into piles of things to be filed, tossed or discussed. Nothing worked. Dave would come up to the office to work on lesson plans for his class or office work he brought home and he would move my piles to side, into one giant pile. It just could not go on.
I’d mentioned to him that I needed my space, room to call my own. My words seemed to fall on deaf ears. Then one afternoon we stopped by the Ruckersville Gallery to look around and I noticed Dave checking out drop front desks. “This one would be nice for you,” he’d say; oohing and ahhing over some mahogany piece. I gave a non-committal “ah-huh” and moved on. I was looking for something to put in the living room and an old-fashioned desk wasn’t what I had in mind for my special room.
The Ruckersville Gallery is a big place and full of all kinds of things that catch my eye. Sometimes they are things from my childhood that bring back lots of memories. Last week I saw a wooden potty chair with a flip down lid. I know we had one of those in our house growing up. I see thing we used to use in daily life that are now so totally outdated and in many cases have no function in our modern world.
It was in this trance of nostalgia that I first spotted her in the corner; a curvy curly maple beauty with ball and claw feet. She showed her years but had aged very gracefully. Carefully I dropped her front which was still firmly secured with original hardware. She didn’t wobble a bit. Inside her back was full of pukas and drawers just waiting to help organize someone’s life. The question was, would that someone be me?
Dave looked at the price and said, “We should buy this for you, it’s perfect!” We can move the big desk out of the office down to the FROG (Finished Room Over the Garage) and I can make an office there. I wasn’t sure. We did find the ideal table for the living room and left without the desk.
I thought about the curly maple desk all week. The more I thought about it, I thought it would be perfect for me; just the right size for my laptop. I could put it against the wall and look out the window to the backyard. I was beginning to visualize myself sitting at her, writing my blog.
Last week flew by at warp speed. Before I knew it, it was Friday; the threshold of the weekend. My friend Angela and I got together after knitting for a lunch in Ruckersville and after running an errand in Stanardsville, decided to stop by the gallery so I could show her the desk. She agreed it was indeed perfect for me. So, with excitement surging through my body and a tad bit of price negotiating, a red SOLD sign was soon hung from my desk.
That evening Dave and I began our furniture shuffle upstairs. We worked for about and hour, getting a feel for where we would put everything and then started early the next morning so we would have a space cleared for our new addition. It was real grunt work, and we discovered many things that we thought we lost forever. It turns out they were only lost in the confusion.
By lunch time on Saturday, my new desk was happily situated against the wall by the window in my office. I gave her a good cleaning which make her curls shine so they almost seemed to bounce. Carefully, I filled her pukas with cards, envelopes and notepads and her drawers with rubber bands, paperclips and a variety of odds and ends. We’re still getting to know each other, but I can say we seem perfect for each other.
Last night I sat down and wrote my first blog at my new desk. While I wrote, Dave worked down the hall in his office. It was nice to have a place to be alone and yet together. As Bogie said at the end of Casablanca, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.