2004-02-10 - 8:56 a.m.

New Desk Part Two

My new desk is fantastic, fabulous and brilliant. Thank you for saying so...The freaky part though was that it was still full of Granny's stuff. Mom had to pack up her Mothers house in AZ recently and sell it. My Granny died last January. Mom had boxes and furniture moved back home to Minnesota. But my Mom is in Florida on vacation so I went to her house after the neighbor let the delivery guys in. Well my mom's house is now packed with boxes and random furniture she decided to keep. I opened the back door to her house and was overcome with the smell of my Grandma. All her stuff smelled like her. It was freaky. She spent 40 years wintering in AZ and what is left of that part of her life is now in 20 boxes in her daughters� livingroom.

I found the desk in the middle of all the boxes. I started to move it and a few of the little drawers slide open and things were in there. Weird things...the things we all keep in our desks. Stamps she had cut off letters, a tiny tape measure, clock keys, newspaper clippings, snapshots, a few old letters (one I had written to her my senior year of High School in 1986! Why? Most of her letters were in a box in her spare bedroom.), a little sewing kit, several letter openers...I quickly closed the drawers and backed away. It was startling. It was pieces of her. It felt so much like her. It felt so wrong to go through her desk. I can only imagine how my Mom felt going through her mothers� whole house try to decide what to keep and what to throw.

I started going through the stuff. I couldn't bear to throw any of it away. I just bagged it up and left it at my Mom's house. Like she really wants to deal with it! Hello! But I didn't want to make a wrong choice about what to throw away.

I did keep one thing...the mini-tape measure. It was so like my Granny to have that on hand...she was always very capable and prepared. I put it in my purse hoping some of her skills will transfer to me!