My mother’s writing desk — it’s a beautiful thing, saturated with memories of my childhood and my mother. You’d think I’d want to sit down and write at that desk.
I don’t.
When I was a girl, my mother sat at that desk to write. She’d write letters to her mother and her sister — because that’s how you kept up with people who lived 240 miles away in mid-century America. You took up a fountain pen, filled it with ink, and you wrote letters.
A Spot by the Window
The desk was given a place of honor next to the front window of the living room of our post-war Detroit neighborhood. From her desk, my mother had a view of the tidy, newly built bungalows and colonials across the street.
When I was in my teens and we moved to a more ample house in suburban Birmingham, my mother’s desk was once again given pride of place in the carpeted living room.
Later, however, when my parents moved to a tiny retirement ranch house on the outskirts of Phoenix, space was short. For years my mother’s desk sat forlornly in a cramped corner of the guest room.
Eventually, my mother downsized yet again and moved into an assisted living apartment here in the Bay Area. I rescued the old thing from the Goodwill giveaway and had it delivered to my house.
It’s a beautiful desk. A curved top, delicate swooping legs, carved wooden drawers, and a carved chair to match. I like it a lot.
My Mother’s Writing Desk — It’s Got a History
The desk was a wedding gift to my mother from her rich grandaunt. The rich aunt and my mother’s mother, or so the story goes, had a few drinks over lunch in downtown Chicago before setting off to shop for a wedding present for my mother.
It wasn’t until late in her life that my mother confided to me that the whole time she had owned it, she had resented the heck out of that expensive desk and that boozy lunch. What she and my dad had really needed was a bed.
Beautiful as it is, the desk is so imbued with memories of my mother and my childhood that being in the same room with it is like being in the same room with my mother. I open a drawer, and inside there are blue-black ink stains. I pull the chair out and I see the worn spot where my mother sat.
Sometimes, the desk is just a desk, lovely and graceful, complete unto itself. At other times, I am cooped up indoors with it and with my mother. It’s a dark winter’s day in Detroit, and I have no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to read, nobody and nothing to play with, no thoughts to call my own.
Keeping Company with the Recliners and TV
Jon and I tried putting the desk in different rooms around our house here in California. It looked very pretty in our living room in its rightful place by the front window with its view of the the magnolia tree. But the desk’s petite lines were overwhelmed by the furniture already in the room — big-boned Victorian tables from Jon’s side of the family.
Ultimately, we moved the desk into the den, where it remains today, tucked away – wasted really – in a dark spot, anachronized by our flat-screen TV and our sprawling black leather recliners.
A Desk for a Writing Room?
Some people might say that the logical place for this lovely example of prewar workmanship would be a corner of my writing room. And, yes, there is plenty of space down here. The colors and the proportions of the desk are right. A writing desk for a writer’s room – what could be more fitting?
But those would be people who don’t understand a writer’s work and how much it has in common with sex. Which is – you can’t do it with your mother in the room.
Note to long-time readers: If the story of my mother’s writing desk sounds familiar, that’s because I mentioned it back in
I miss my mother’s writing desk too.