The Little Maple Desk and Chair

The slanted top of my little maple desk opens out to make a shelf on which I could, but don't, write.

 

I don't know where it came from originally. But when I went off to college I needed a desk, and my mother said, "You can take the little maple desk and the little maple chair." So I did.

 

After college, the desk and the chair both ended up back at my parents' house, but when my first husband and I settled in Alabama, we had room for the desk. The next time we were in Indiana, having driven up there with two babies in our little black Volkswagen bug, we tied the desk to the top of the car and took it south.

 

Foreseeing the possibility of rain, we wrapped the desk in plastic before we tied it to the car, but the wind made short work of that attempt at preservation. And then the rain started. For ten hours the little desk was bruised by wind and drowned by rain.

 

When we finally got home, a third of the maple veneer was warped and damaged. That was in 1964.

 

Today the desk, veneer still missing or loose, sits in a corner of my kitchen. Hidden behind its slanted lid are bankbooks, stamps, a stapler, two pairs of scissors, a receipt book, a ruler, and enough other little items to ensure that something gets jammed beneath the hinges whenever I open the lid. At one point in the last 25 years I honored it by buying pretty new hardware for its three drawers.

 

But the veneer! I should check the yellow pages, ask around, do some research, and find someone to fix it. Instead, I keep waiting for the moment when, at a party, I will unexpectedly meet the person who will say, "Oh yes. I do furniture. And I specialize in repairing the veneer on little maple desks." I'll hire him in a New York minute.

 

The little maple chair lives in my multi-purpose room upstairs. When we need extra seating for guests, it is the second chair in line to be pressed into dinner-party service.

 

 

Copyright 2011 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com