The Desk

The desk is an old spindle my mother and I bought at an antique store in Janesville, Wisconsin, the summer before I went away to college. The twin sleigh bed we bought that same day, which I owned and used as a bed, then a couch, then a guest bed, now stays in the lakehouse they’ll retire to in two years. My nephew likes to trace the whorls on the headboard while listening to Good Night Construction Site again. The desk’s spindle legs are removable by inverting the desk and twisting them, making it easy to move, which I have done between Des Plaines and Oxford, Ohio, between Cincinnati and Chicago, between Bronxville and the Bronx, between Brooklyn and Logan Square. When we removed the legs at the antique store in Janesville, one of the legs hit my mother in the leg and made a huge wobbling vein appear down the front of her calf. I didn’t know if it would ever go away, and I was afraid of getting old..