I have a piece of furniture that once belonged to my Nana. I believe it is called a secretary. It is vertical, has two doors which open to reveal shelves, and a drop-down writing desk. It is not of good quality or design. And, as the unfortunate result of a wood bleaching technique that was very popular in the 1940s, it is a particularly hideous color best described as Moldy Light Rye Bread.
Once the writing desk is opened, you can sit and answer your fan mail or perhaps work on your memoir. It just has that kind of feeling. There are three small drawers directly in front of you, should you need to retrieve a fresh quill or your sealing wax. I use two of them for cocktail napkins, the other for tealight candles and toothpicks. The shelves are just right for my motley assortment of wineglasses. The drop-down surface functions as a tidy little bar.
When I was small, these drawers were Never-Land. They didn’t really contain anything magical, but it always felt like they could. Only a pen, a spare house key, a letter opener, a stamp – but the whole aura of it was so fancy, and I would pretend I was Eloise at the Plaza, or Mary Poppins, or Eliza Doolittle.
One thing I could always find in the drawers was a bookmark. Most of them were handmade, by me, since reading was Nana’s passion and I was always eager to try out some new craft project. After she died, I went back to the secretary, still in her dining room and not yet in mine. I opened a drawer and pulled out a funny-looking one that can generously be described as homely. It was obviously handmade by a child, carefully, but the whole thing was rather pathetic.
Imagine four identical pieces of felt, cut out to resemble a mitten. Each set of two were sewn together in a buttonhole stitch, leaving the bottom open. Once this was completed, a spring-loaded metal hair clip was inserted inside the mittens, so if you squeezed it open it could clamp onto a few book pages.
Another was made of gimp, with beads on one end to spill out the place it marked. Very practical, that design, since it didn’t actually allow the book to close. There was another one made of cardboard with dried leaves and glitter that stuck to the pages. The sticky, the lumpy, the ugly– my Nana saved them all.
Yesterday my daughter took mercy on me and reconfigured my computer, upgrading a browser to a newer, faster version. We bantered about Operating Systems, Preferences, and Cookies. Passwords. Downloads. Blogs. URLs. PDFs. When she was done, I asked if she had been able to save my Bookmarks. “Yes, Mom.” she said, “Of course. I saved them all.” The word had a totally different meaning, but when I looked at the grown woman who said it, I smiled at the fact that she’s named for the earlier saver of bookmarks.
For a moment, it felt like we were all in the same room.