Nana’s Desk

by SUSAN DEAN

​It stands on slender, curvy legs in the corner of my living room. It holds my trinkets and treasures, scraps of paper, old bills and receipts, paper clips, stationery for the letters I still do write, photos waiting for albums, and pens that have no ink.

​A lady’s desk, I was told, by someone who knows about these things.

​I remember when it stood in my grandmother’s dining room. My maternal grandmother, Lydia May Mellor. Her birthday was April 4th and she’d be…oh…128 this year. She was 76 when she died — I was a junior in college. My Nana.

​A lady’s desk — a drop-down — with lots of tiny nooks and recesses and drawers. Petite and unassuming, but a solid wood presence with carved, curled swirls on its face. Holding court while we ate our holiday dinners, we were oblivious to its silent witness as the grownups talked of bigger things and my brothers, cousins, and I ran past it on our way outside.

​I wonder what it held back then? Probably coasters and cloth napkins, hand-written recipes, lace handkerchiefs, a treasured photo or two. Perhaps Sunday gloves or an age-old love letter safely tucked away. Maybe spools of thread, and buttons my grandmother had removed from worn-out clothes — buttons she could use again. A pin cushion, a cloth tape measure — faded yellow and wrinkled.

​Nana knew how to sew — anything and everything. Her hands were gnarled and worn, but she sewed so beautifully. She could take a piece of cloth and without a pattern use her foot pedal-operated Singer to create something wonderful. Clothes and curtains and slipcovers. She could make chairs and sofas look new again using only her hands and the magic of her skills, her mind, her ingenuity, and with only an elementary school education. She had to drop out of school when her mother died to help her father “keep house” and to take care of her younger siblings.

​I remember the doll clothes she made for me. Dresses and ensembles for my Barbies. I remember one that I marveled at even back then. A long fancy dress coat for my Barbie doll — cranberry corduroy with a hood and cuffs encircled with black fur — a seven-inch replica of a coat one might see in a magazine or a department store ad. And fully lined with pink satin.

​Even then I wondered how she had managed to sew such perfectly aligned sleeves with tiny stitches and pleats that allowed the shoulders to puff up ever so slightly — ever so smartly. I started to fully appreciate this when I began to make my own clothes in my teens. Trying to sew my adult-size clothes using Simplicity, McCall’s, or Butterick patterns (never Vogue — way too fancy for my teenage tastes!) was enough of a challenge for me. How did my grandmother create these miniature fashions so perfectly?

​She made clothes for my Thumbelina doll, too — the infant doll that moved her head from side to side along with her arms and legs in a gentle motion — sort of resembling the stirrings of a newborn when you wound the plastic dial sticking out of her back. I still have one of the dresses. It’s pale yellow with tiny pink and green flowers, rounded puff sleeves, two tiny buttons gracing the front of the bodice, the gathered skirt just long enough to cover Baby Thumbelina’s knees (so that her knit booties would show), all trimmed with rickrack and dainty lace. And an opening in back to accommodate that head-turning dial.

​Nana’s desk sits in my living room — silently speaking volumes. It makes me wonder. Its wood is now a faded red-brown darkened with age. What tree gave its life-blood and flesh for it to be carved into existence? The wavy veins and wood grain spirals speak of a beginning from a forest somewhere lost in time.

Was my grandmother’s dining room its first home? My grandmother was a young bride in 1917 — my grandfather off to war. Fear, uncertainty, and unrest were rampant, and there was news of a deadly influenza circling the world. All of this happened a century ago, but eerily similar to our times now.

​We all have hopes and dreams. What were my grandmother’s hopes and what did she dream about? Did she ever wish for more in her life? She was a reflection of her generation and her circumstances, living in a time when choices, especially for women, were limited.

​When I received the desk after my grandfather died, I found something that had belonged to my grandmother tucked away in the corner of one of the tiny drawers. A silver thimble — worn from use — left behind, forgotten.

​I’ve kept Nana’s thimble in my desk…her desk. I think of her every time I see it sitting in its place of honor in one of the tiny nooks inside.

​My grandmother — my Nana Lydia May. Her hands were gnarled with age, but they were working hands — always busy, always creating. Creating the life she had — and for me sweet memories — including a silver thimble shining from her finger as she sewed in the afternoon sunlight. A reflection of the life that was hers, a life well-lived, a life that was full in its quiet simplicity.