The Strange Acquisition of the Sewing Desk

Adapt, improvise, and overcome. Some days, I do this more than others. I was thinking about juggling the other day, and how there are times I feel like I'm dropping balls all over. This blog, for instance, which has wandered from a daily flight up and over into the other hand, to rolling across the floor surprising my readers with the occasional post. Juggling isn't something you just pick up six balls and cascade them into a gravity-defying display the next minute with. No, you start with the slowest possible material: chiffon scarves. And you only juggle with one, to begin. There are days I need to go back to the beginning, and I was never a good juggler.

What I am good at, on the other hand, is scrounging. I've never had a lot of money, and frankly I prioritize my money a little differently than most people might, I suspect. I also have an allergy to debt. Just having the mortgage makes the First Reader and I unhappy, but once the kids are through college we'll power through that, too. Putting them through school with no debt for the first two years is within our grasp, we just can't have all the things we want when we want them. which you should by no means interpret to mean that we're depriving ourselves - or them - we just do it on a budget. Sometimes, this means I get creative when I want something that isn't in the budget. Like furniture for the office.

I like good, solid, wood furniture. So much of what you see in stores these days is particle board, which swells, rots, falls apart if you look at it funny, and is heavier than the equivalent hardwood. In short, I have a partiality for antiques. Which, surprisingly, is usually cheaper to buy than new furniture is. And if you are willing to take on a bit of a project, you can sometimes find the darndest things for free. All you have to do is come and get them.

When I answered the craigslist ad for the free desks, I wasn't sure that I'd wind up coming home with a desk. For one thing, the ad was a little odd. There were several desks, and bookshelves, available for free. Clearing a house out, the ad read. But I needed at least one, and maybe two, desks for the little office house. And my budget for furnishing the office was very, very slim, mostly being spent on cleaning supplies. Scrounging? Sure, I can do that. So I schlepped over the road to the address I'd been given, and that's when it got weird.

I'd been told I would be met at the house, and when I pulled up in front of it I was a bit early, so I took the time to look around me. I was in a small subdivision, older houses. At the edge of the subdivision - I could see a cornfield or at least the stubble of on, through the fringe of trees at the end of the street. The last house on the street, it was a split level with a disheveled front garden, winter-worn, and in the upper bay window curtains sagged halfway off the rod. Why, I wondered, were there multiple desks in the ad? Was this an estate house, being cleaned out by the relatives who were frustrated with the prospect of paying to have junk hauled off, might as well get some poor mokes to do it for you?

I will admit I did a double-take when the fellow pulled up and got out of his small pickup. He was a dead ringer for Oleg Volk, and as I was talking to him, other than the lack of Russian accent (his was Canadian) he remained a doppelgänger down to the slightly shy initial impression giving way to a passion for his enthusiasm. Which in this case, was the house renovation. I'd stumbled into a flip. The tall man with the knife-blade nose, high forehead and black hair waving back off of it cheerfully described to me how he and his wife traveled for her job, buying houses in seven states so far, gutting them, renovating, selling, and moving. He showed me how he planned to open out the kitchen, where he'd already torn out the cabinets, and then he waved me to the back of the house. "There's desks in all the rooms. Take as many as you want. Take anything, we don't want it!"

Slightly confused, I walked down the dingy hall, and looked into the first bedroom. It was nearly filled on two walls by a huge desk, the kind you would usually see making up the workspace in a cubicle. The next bedroom was the same, only the desk was even bigger and there were impressions in the dirty carpet where bookshelves had been - they had gone early, I was told. The night before the vultures had descended and much was already gone. Frankly, that made what did remain that much stranger.

The third upstairs bedroom had a bed, or at least bare mattress on a frame in it, not so strange. Then I went down the half-flight of stairs into the basement. Lit only by the light that managed to filter through the very dirty glass of a sliding glass door (which led, I assumed, out into the back yard), I could see a fairly good sized room that was mostly empty other than a small round wooden table. On the table were a huge dictionary and a steel letter in-box. I used my flashlight to explore the rest of the basement, comfortable in knowing that my host was happily puttering on the back deck with his young wife, who had arrived as I descended the stairs. I could hear their footsteps overhead as I shone my light into a series of small, dank rooms. A room with a desk crammed into it, barely room for a chair between it and the wall. A room with a twin bed, just a filthy bare broken-down mattress, and a desk. Another larger room past the furnace had two desks in it. There was a toilet in the furnace room. A room under the stairs was void of windows, and held a metal-framed desk with a broken keyboard shelf. In the doorway of that room, halfway to the stairs, as though it had been moved toward them and abandoned, was a small wooden desk. I opted not to go into the rooms, feeling thoroughly creeped out, and pulled the little desk toward the steps.

I didn't want the big desks in the upstairs. Particle-board anything doesn't break down well again after it's been built, and I'd have to take them apart a lot to get them out of the house. I really didn't want to go into the rooms in the basement. Just... no. I'm a coward, maybe, but if you don't have to push your luck, why? I piled the foot-thick dictionary and the in-box on the small desk, and popped up the stairs to make sure it was ok to take.

"Take anything!" The wife reassured me. "Please, we don't want to have to deal with it. Do you need a chair?" She pointed at a desk chair sitting in the living room near the forlorn curtains. Oddly in the dingy house, it looked pristine. I took it.

A little help later, I slid the desk, chair, book, et al into my vehicle, and headed for the office, still trying to decide what on earth I had just encountered. Not the house flippers - I wish that happy pair the best of luck turning a profit and perhaps rehabilitating it into a home again. Because I had no idea what that was, or why it was crammed into an externally-normal house on the cul-de-sac of a quiet neighborhood. I wondered if the neighbors had known what was going on in that house. Wouldn't there have been a lot of cars if all those desks were manned? Why would there be so many desks if not a business of some kind? WTH?

Back at the office, I unloaded the heavy wooden desk and finally took the time to really look at it. In the dim basement where I'd found it, the decision to take it was made in a split second. Now, I realized just what I'd gotten - I knew it was a sewing desk when I saw it there, but it wasn't until I unfolded, and unfolded some more, and found the hidden drawer, and the extra pieces tucked carefully inside, that I could fully appreciate it. And why.... why was it there? One more seat in some sordid enterprise? That seemed uncomfortable, at best. I'm a short woman and unless you tuck up the board where the sewing machine would have sat, there's no knee room.

It's a small mystery. It's part of the reason I do enjoy scrounging. You never know what you're going to find, and sometimes the questions are unanswerable. Like the dictionary I retrieved. Copyrighted 1927, nearly a century of use has left it battered. But it opened immediately to the pages where someone at some time in the past had carefully sandwiched a red rose between wax paper and pressed it in the heavy book. There are stories and memories mute between the words of the dictionary.