FOR SALE: Desk In Need of a Writer

FOR SALE— White desk with scrolled drawers and just right for a little girl to grow up into— preferably someone who’ll write stories into its wood and not mind the dinks and bruises.

I wrote my first novel on it, which also happened to be my last. I wrote my first few articles, then hundreds after. I wrote letters to friends across the country, and one to Mr. Andrew Peterson, which won a prize in the newspaper’s “Letters to Authors” contest and was printed on the front page. But more than that, I wrote bad, cluttered writing that got stuffed in the drawers and never saw the light of day. NOTE: Rough drafts and half-written essays not included with the desk.

CONDITION— There are two big warts on the desk’s surface where Mom left a hot jar of beef broth one day and made the wood bubble. I never painted over them; they just became familiar knolls on the landscape. I didn’t paint over the pencil

scratches, either, reckoning I’d just be adding to them, and I hope the desk finds someone who makes their own marks in the mad act of writing. (The writer’s desk is, after all, only and always there to serve the writing.)

AVAILABLE— Somewhere out on the floor of the resale shop called Grace’s, between armoires and baskets and lamp shades. Can’t guarantee it hasn’t been picked up, because if unwritten stories make up an ocean, then that desk is the helm of a daring little craft, who, in God’s providence, may have found a new captain to sail her. And if the girl is anything like me, she’ll have discovered the desk in the aisle of the store and run her fingers across the dinked wood and started imagining the places it’ll take her.

If interested, please call.

And if you happen to be the girl, Godspeed.