Writing Desk

I don’t recall when or where I first became aware of the tiny writing desk, though it must have been at my maternal grandparents’ house, probably in the basement where my cousin and I would spend the occasional weekend night, listening to a gothic-shaped wooden radio from the 1930s, playing board games, and steeping tea ever so slowly over a steam radiator until tepid. When my grandfather died, my grandmother moved into a smaller house and then later, when her health declined in her late-80s, into an assisted-living apartment. It was sometime during those moves that I as a college student with some aspirations to be a writer took interest in the desk and asked, informally, if I might have it when the right time came. When my grandmother died, the desk ended up in my parents’ house, and when my father went into a nursing home and my mother moved into an apartment, the desk found its way to the back of a walk-in closet. I kept my eye on it and my bid for it with each move. This past week, while visiting my mother, she said that she’d like to make room in the closet for a shoe rack and asked if I would take the desk. Of course I would. It fit easily in the back of my car. No problem.

I have no idea why I took an interest in this desk, let alone kept that interest up all these years. As a college student, living in small apartments, writing my papers on a kitchen table, or maybe the floor, it probably seemed the perfect size to fit a textbook or writing tablet or my portable Smith-Corona. But back then there was no chance of me gaining possession. And as to its qualities qua desk, it’s a tiny thing, three feet tall at the back, two feet wide, a top shelf of seven inches, an interior shelf of seven-by-three inches, no drawers or cubby holes, a pull-down writing surface one foot by two feet in front and one foot by one-and-a-half foot inside, all perched on four simple (and simply) turned legs. There are two small square rods with ceramic knobs that pull out to support the hinged door/writing surface, and a lock, long-since missing a key. In all, it’s as minimally functional as one might find. And it’s not at all in that great of shape. There has been at least one broken piece in the front, below the door, patched back together with a row of screws. There are any number of nicks and dents. There are several serious spills of what appear to be ink from inkwells, as well as considerable wear overall.

But whatever interest I might have originally had in this tiny writing desk, the story and the peopling of the desk infused it with a family history – mostly unknown to this day – that is only hinted at by the posted note in fragile cursive from my grandmother: “Elmdale, Illinois Wood from 1850.” In a brief note I’ve seen elsewhere I suspect that she intended that space to be filled in with something like “a walnut tree on my great-grandfather’s farm.” Her great-grandfather (my great-great-great-grandfather), a Dixon if he was on her paternal side, I don’t know what if it was her maternal side, apparently felled the walnut tree, hewed it, cut and lathed it, constructed and finished it (all without power tools), on his farm in Elmdale, Illinois, in 1850, and it has been passed down – and apparently used – for the past 161 years. Perhaps he was furnishing his first house. Perhaps it was a gift for his wife or a child. Perhaps he had his own aspirations to be a writer. I can’t imagine ever knowing anything more about the desk’s origins or first 100 years. But I know of its past 61 years, a quiet period, and it now rests comfortably in my home, next to the dining room table my wife and I bought when we first moved into our house with our inheritance from my grandmother’s estate.