Desk is cherished for its memories
Shortly after my grandmother died, questions prevailed about how to divide up her furniture. She just had so much of it, having collected antiques for most of her adult life. They filled not only her main house but a well-furnished guesthouse as well, and there was more in storage.
Ownership of the big pieces, such as the dining room table, had already been decided, but that still left us with dozens of end tables and armchairs to distribute.
I found myself unable to think about it at all. It wasn't a matter of grief -- my grandmother lived to be 94, and her death was a reasonable ending to a life well lived. I just couldn't conceptualize of how to work any more pieces of furniture, especially antiques, into the layout of my very contemporary home.
Fortunately, my sister and my mother are more abstract thinkers than I am. They labeled things with my name when I couldn't cope with deciding for myself what I might want. Along with a beautiful bronze platter, a Herbert Bayer painting, and a dictionary stand, I ended up with a 19th-century writing desk that had once been in my grandparents' guesthouse.
Now the desk is in my home office, where it stands opposite the desk I use when I work. The two are as different as two pieces of furniture that fall under the same general category could be. My primary desk rests on a base of molded steel. Its surface is glass, its edges curved. It has no drawers, but an expansive surface to hold my computer, monitor, keyboard, and desktop accessories. I strew its surface with paycheck stubs, ATM receipts, business cards, calculators, staplers, notes, and binder clips.
By contrast, the antique desk from my grandmother's estate is diminutive. Looking at its design, I ponder what kind of person it was intended for and what kind of work was expected to be done on it. With its confined knee space, it could accommodate only a slender person sitting primly in a straight, hard chair -- nothing like the ultra-adjustable, ergonomic chair I use. Though it is well made, the antique desk does not seem sturdy; I imagine that it would buckle under the weight of my desktop computer. The drawers are so narrow that they can hold only random small objects: batteries, chargers for my many electronic devices, pencils and pens that I, an inveterate keyboard user, seldom use.
When I try to picture the woman who used this desk when it was new -- well before my grandmother's time -- I imagine an aristocratic Victorian homemaker, sitting straight in a full skirt, writing hostessy letters on small sheets of paper with fountain pens.
My grandmother herself never used this desk; she bought it for ornamental purposes and kept it in a bedroom in her guesthouse. Nonetheless, it was well cared for, polished regularly by a housekeeper.
I would recognize anywhere a piece of furniture from my grandmother's house simply by the scent of the furniture polish. Sometimes I open the drawers of the antique desk just to fill my office with that smell, because that, more than anything visual, reminds me of my grandmother's house. The house is gone now. Not only has the furniture been dispersed, the structure itself was razed by the property's new owner.
Missing a house that has been torn down is different from missing a house that you no longer live in, I've discovered. It's like the difference between missing someone who moved away and missing someone who is dead. When you move out of a house, even if you know that logically you'll never own it again or perhaps even set foot in it again, you still know that it's technically possible to return.
When a house is razed, it ceases to exist, like a person who dies. You know that you can absolutely never go home again, in a sense far more literal than the usual one.
So despite its impracticality, I'm grateful that I have the desk. I do wish the house wasn't gone. But I'm glad my mother had the foresight to claim this curious little piece of furniture for me, as a reminder of things that no longer exist.
People. Houses. And a time when women sat very straight in heavy skirts to pen letters, in ink, on small sheets of paper.
Globe correspondent Nancy Shohet West lives in Carlisle. Her grandmother lived on a ranch in Aspen, Colo. 
