Everyone knows that I am attached to my desk. I would argue I have good reason. My desk is an extension of myself. Whereas other people are attached to their phones, I frequently lose track of mine. (Just writing this made me wonder where it was. Don’t worry; I found it.) My desk is my home inside my home.
I hear about people working from their couch or from their kitchen table or even from their bed and I cannot imagine it. My desk is always tidy. I always have fresh flowers sitting on it—even if it’s just a rose from the garden or a bouquet from the grocery store.
My desk came from a junk shop that my parents and I visited a few years ago. It’s a child’s desk and was painted fire engine red. It did not look promising.
But my dad knocked on the wood beneath the red paint, “It’s solid maple,” he declared. I bought it for $15. We took it to my dad’s wood shop, refinished it, and I have used it ever since. One hot summer night a fan came flying off the windowsill, making a deep gouge in the top. I sanded out the gouge, but then put watersoluble polyurethane on the surface. That was a mistake. The surface has begun to dissolve beneath my hands, peeling like a snake losing its skin.
So now my desk is getting refinished before it gets loaded into a big truck and taken to our new home. In the meantime, my husband, Peter, said I could use his reject computer desk, which is being left behind.
Peter’s old desk had a storage tower on top, which he knew would get in my way, so he removed it. It also had a slide-out thingy the keyboard was supposed to sit on and that was never going to work, so I yanked it out. Below that was a shelf, which bumped my knees, so I threw that away as well. There was one last brace I had to straddle and Peter smashed it out with the back side of an ax.
I was still unsatisfied. The little desk rolled around every time I moved. I felt as if I was typing on a boat. “This isn’t going to work!” I told Peter, who was doing his best to get his old desk to meet what seemed to me like minimal requirements: a stationary ...
