Aunt Jennie's Desk

I love Aunt Jennie's desk. It's made of mahogany with a pull-out writing surface, six pigeon holes, two little drawers, one big drawer underneath, and a folding top. Its legshave been shaped by a lathe and regularly fall out if the table is moved or lifted from the floor. I can remember the desk, then stained to a dark finish, as it sat just inside the door of Aunt Jennie's modest home in Jamestown, New York. I was probably ten or so when we visited that home at 7 Garfield Street. Both the house and the street are long gone now, the victim of hospital expansion. Only the sign "Garfield Street" remains. After Aunt Jennie died, the desk lived with me in Peterborough, Ontario, in the main hallway of our upstairs apartment. Later it travelled with me to Toronto and eventually to Bethesda. At some point my pareents reclaimed it and my mother refinished it to a glorious golden brown. It stayed with them when they moved to Virginia from Erie, and ultimately to a retirement community. In later years, after my mother died, I would visit my dad, take him out to lunch, and then put him to bed for his afternoon nap, drawing the wheelchair to just the right angle, helping him to lift his legs, and covering him with his beloved University of Minnesota afghan. Before rolling to his side, he would take out his hearing aids and hand them to me. "Put them on Aunt Jennie's desk. Then I'll know where to find them." Now the desk sits in my dining room, still holding the precious railroad pocket watch that belonged to my grandfather, still redolent of family memories. [ Aunt Jennie,by the way, was a very refined person with soft wavy gray (once red) hair and powdered cheeks. She once advised me not to use the word "stink" but rather, "It has an unpleasant odor." She always won when we played the card game "I Doubt It." No one believed that the sweet old lady could lie like a rug.]