This room is like many, walls and a floor and a ceiling and windows. There is a door to a bathroom and from there, a door to storage. To the east there are windows with Levolors I have hated these years and months since we bought the house. Turn the corner north and what you have is a surface bearing photos, postcards, Valentines and kids' drawings. There are stickers with FUEL coffee and Abraham Lincoln and Crystal Mountain and Wahoo's Fish Tacos and Rip Curl and Chivas, which I think is for soccer, not whiskey. My husband collects stickers. I have never asked him about that. My husband, in fact, has laid claim to the room, the office, by hanging a photograph of Glasgow School of Art and aerial photos of Oban and Scotland's coasts and by only buying one chair for the desk.
I know. I could buy a chair for myself. It could be any color. It’s on my list.
Three doors from Home Depot, like the kind you walk through to enter a room, make up the expanse of desk. This desk holds piles. The piles are papers and printouts for our work, next to preschool updates for our son, guidelines for how to be a fourth grade room parent, and homework for our daughter. The doordesk is propped on cabinets that are full of files. My husband had them made years ago from metal that showed weld marks; truth in materials and all that.
A sofa that pulls out to a bed squats under the window on the south wall, the one that also has a door. The cat is the color of the upholstery, next to the cage that houses the hamster. Cat and hamster sleep.
A table we bought for our daughter nine years ago, when she could walk and sit in a chair, now gets used by our son. I can’t see its surface for the calendar, block, lid to a bin full of sewing, a sketchbook, a Pee-Chee and a publication guide for the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. The chair that matches the table is on the floor, on its side, having been upended by the son.
The Macintosh shames the PC on the desk surface. They stare at shelves on the west wall holding business books my husband buys and does not read. I admit I have papers on those shelves too, with leaves and flowers and goldfish and colors. The papers are from Japan and India and France. I sometimes still make these papers into books to give away. But mostly, I protect them from the children.
