This summer was spent emptying out my in-law’s house that they had lived in for about fifty years. My mother-in-law passed away in the spring of 2023, and this summer it was time to sell the house. My in-laws were wonderful, loving people, and losing them impacted our family in so many ways. We’re lucky they both lived long lives, and going through all their things was both an honor and an overwhelming chore.
My in-laws were from the generation that saved everything. When they got a new coffee pot, they saved the old coffee carafe, just in case. If they bought a new toaster, they put the old one down in the basement for back-up. So, in going through their belongings, there were many moments of wonder. Why did they save this? What is this? Wow, this is so cool! Why have I never seen it before?
In the process of cleaning out the house, some treasures came to belong to us. My mother-in-law’s old rolltop desk was one of them. That desk sat in a corner in their dining room for as long as I’ve known them, and probably, since they owned that house. It’s where they stored their paperwork, paid bills, wrote thank-you notes, and it was full of office supplies.
I love that old desk, but we didn’t really have a place for it in our house. No one else in the family said they wanted it, so I decided to bring it to school and make it the “Writer’s Desk” in my classroom.
I cleaned it up and organized all the contents. I kept the pens, pencils and notepads that my mother-in-law stored there in the drawers. There was a little stapler, an old small dictionary, and a calculator too. I kept the old 3-cent stamps and Harry Truman stamps in the drawer. I also kept the mystery keys. The keys that belong to vehicles no longer owned, and post office boxes of long ago. I placed a lamp that we found in the basement on the top of the desk and a framed picture of my mother-in-law. Then I wrote up a little note about the desk and the lady who owned it.
In Loving Memory of Mary Ellen Handford
1940 – 2023
This desk and all its contents belonged
to my mother-in-law Mary Handford.
She loved to write and tell stories, and
she was the editor of her school newspaper
in high school. She always said that if she
had it to do all over again, she would have
become a journalist. She would be so happy
to see young writers using her beautiful rolltop desk.
Mrs. Handford
As my new 6th graders came to tour the school at the beginning of this school year, they all wanted to know about the desk. “Who gets to sit there?” They would ask. I told them I was still deciding how that would work, but that everyone who wanted to would get a chance.
Now, we are about to start the third week of the new school year. I’ve decided to allow students to use the desk on a rotating basis. Each week I have a student take the job of the “greeter” in the classroom. That student is in charge of greeting students as they come into class and checking students off on an attendance list. They then give the list to me, and I put the official attendance into the computer. The greeter is a voluntary position, and it changes weekly, so everyone will get the chance to do that job if they want to. I’ve decided that the greeter will get to use the writer’s desk for that week. If they don’t want to use the desk, they can choose someone else who wants to sit there. I also told students that if they are at school in the morning before class starts, and they want to sit down and use one of Mary’s thank-you notes to write a thank-you note to someone, then any of them can do that too. I told them that the person sitting at the writer’s desk is allowed to use any supplies that are in it as well.
Putting that desk in my classroom has created a homey, magical feel in there. The students can’t wait to start using the Writer’s Desk. I know Mary really would be tickled to be a part of our classroom like that, and she would be happy to see how much joy her old desk brings to my students.