As I sit down to type this evening I feel incredibly blessed. I am after all, sitting down to write; that alone makes my heart soar. I’m perched contentedly in the desk chair I found at an estate sale and painted a glossy candy apple red. My desk is large square that used to be my great grandmother's dining room table. Its glossy mahogany surface makes me feel connected in a way few possessions do. The small brass plate on the underside of the surface bears the name of a furniture company long out of business. The raised letters of that little plaque remind me that the old saying is perhaps true: They just don’t make them like they used too. This table is both sturdy and beautiful with rounded legs, beveled edges and has a perfection in shape and symmetry that I would have thought impossible outside of a factory.
After it was my great grandmother's, this table was my parents’ dining room table. On holidays and special occasions we set it with my parents wedding china and covered its mahogany with a lace table cloth. Opposite the brass plaque there is a white sticker that no one has removed. It’s from the move we made when I was a sophomore in high school. We moved a couple of other times, but I know that sticker as well as I know any graphic image, and it’s from 1998. But that sticker isn’t the only marker of my childhood. On the table surface is a giant scorch mark. Some might call it ugly; some might even think it ruins the table. I see the history, and I can’t help but smile as I think of the Advent Wreath that we all thought was so lovely: The tall purple and pink pillar taper candles surrounded by a ring of real evergreen. I remember exactly what I was doing when the smoke detectors went off.
When my husband and I moved into our current home, there was no space for a dining room table, which I figured was just as well as we so rarely used it for such a purpose, but I couldn’t bear to part with my heirloom. So I hauled it upstairs to my office and decided it would make a fine desk.
Tonight, I sit in my desk chair, a bottle of wine just within reach. In front of me is, of course, the laptop I’m typing on. Two other sides hold my sewing machine and typewriter while the third I hope to someday organize into an organizational file system and not just a pile of paper. From my chair I can see the cornfield behind my back yard, I can watch the light change as the sun sets, I can sip a glass of wine and write about a piece of furniture. How blessed indeed.