My new Desk, Bill

Yesterday, i drove my roommate up north to pick up a new car. a friend of his mother's lost her husband and had decided to sell his old le sabre to jon for a very fair price. being the good friend that i am, i agreed to take the trip with him to pick up his new car and i'm very glad i did. it was one of those days that just sort of fell into place, ya know? I met one of the sweetest women with bright white hair and perfect wrinkles around her eyes from obviously smiling too much and i just wanted to put her in my pocket and go have coffee with her. we went to her house to pick up the new car and as we pulled up, i could see that her garage was full of everything but cars. furniture and rugs and kitchenware and other odds and ends. she asked me if i had any interest in antiques or furniture and i almost laughed, as anyone that knows me knows i would die before giving up my love for antique furniture. and so, she gave me this beauty. Her husband recently passed away and she was basically clearing out her home and getting rid of everything. she told me that she had already cleared out a few truck loads of things from her house and she had no intention of stopping. She said that come winter, she's going out to stay with her daughter in Hawaii and that if I wanted to take this desk home with me,  I could have it. Isn't it beautiful? and so, jon and i packed her gently into the back of my car and she came back down to cincinnati with me. i drove extra safely and took corners with more precaution than usual. this was my new baby, after all.  I can't imagine how it was used in its past life. maybe for writing letters to friends? maybe where kids would sit and learn their times tables? or possibly it was where the head of a household sat and paid off mortgages and balanced check books. 

My dad used to sit at our kitchen table and pay all of our monthly bills. we lived in a trailer and didn't have room for an office or study and i remember he would spread everything out all across our little kitchen table and would somehow keep track of all of it. bills were always paid on time. mail was always kept in order. and I used to sit and watch in amazement as he wrote out checks and licked stamps and i would think about how cool it was to be a grown up and do things like that. 20 years later, paying bills has since lost most of its glamorous appeal. i have a terrible habit of only checking my mailbox once or twice a month and I'm sure i'm the most hated apartment on our block if you ask my mailman. i get anxiety every time i open a bill, praying that it's somewhere in the ballpark of what i thought it was supposed to be. i have the same habits of my dad when it comes to just spreading bills all over the place and that's where my new beautiful desk comes into play. i want to fill him (the desk)  with stamps and envelopes and stationary. i want to write letter to my friends without telling them. (hopefully they check their mailboxes more often than i do. ha!) i want to utilize the space to actually write with ink and not just a keyboard. 

and so behold, my new "bill desk"! His name is Bill. Obviously.