Little rolltop desk

When I was a little girl, my grandma gave me a desk that had been hers when she was a little girl.  In the same way, Olivia got a rocking chair from our great grandma Olivia.  Sometimes being a namesake comes with advantages.

I loved the little rolltop desk and I stuffed the drawers and pigeon holes full of treasures.  The roll top never raised and lowered quite right and then the wood started coming apart so I stopped trying to raise and lower it.

I asked Enoch to fix the desk and he gamely took it for that purpose.  Life got in the way, like it does, and the desk ended up in storage.

When Enoch and his family recently moved, he gave my parents the desk to give to me.

My dad fixed it.  Because he's my dad.

He discovered that the reason the rolltop didn't work so well was because there was school work stuffed inside of it.  There was also a Snoopy ruler my mom thought maybe belonged to my aunt.

I said, "I think it's my ruler," because I remembered trying to maneuver the struggling rolltop with a ruler.  My dad gave me the contents of the desk in a ziplock bag and I put the desk in the corner of our family room for now.  I don't know where its permanent home will be, but for now it looks right at home between the old suitcases and the stump Ammon gave me from a tree he cut down in his yard.  

I like what I like.

I didn't recognize the ruler, but when I turned it over, it was indeed mine.

Here's a spelling book of my grandma's from sixth grade:

My grandma had much neater schoolgirl handwriting than I did.

I was fascinated by this math assignment because I guess the teacher wrote out the questions in longhand and used carbon paper to duplicate it.

(I was kind of horrified by the math assignment because it had mice teethmarks all over it.)

Altogether it makes me happy.  My grandma, my dad who fixes everything, my childhood desk, school work, a window into teachers in the past.  It all makes me happy.