Mark gave me a desk as a wedding gift. A gorgeous, antique, white, worn, delicate desk with round knobs and small drawers made to hold nothing larger than a few pencils or maybe cigarettes. Perfection. The desk sits catty-corner in the living room of our apartment beside an old chipped window that looks out on the great oak tree, now green with wet spring, that is so big it fills the windows along our entire apartment.
We live on the second floor of an old house in one of the most veteran areas of Winston-Salem, Ardmore. The houses in our neighborhood vary in size, from cottage to mansion, but they are all very complicated. That is the only word that fits: complicated. In a bewildering sort of way. The height of the trees and the diameter of the large tree trunks all around the windy streets divulge the great seniority of the streets. The North Carolina Baptist hospital is right around the corner and doctors walk home in lab coats for lunch and nurses linger on corners during their breaks.
The front porch of the house is crumbling. It is supposed to have a half-moon upper deck for us upstairs apartments, but the wood has gone utterly rotten and exposed soggy beams are held up by school bus yellow scaffolding. The house has been this way since before we rented it and looking back, it surprises me that we called the phone number on the "For Rent" sign posted there in the front lawn. The scaffolding seems beatnik, which I kind of like.
Walking into the foyer, where the door is never fully closed, there are four doors side by side. We are the third door from the left: Apartment C thank you kindly. It usually smells like burning incense there in the foyer because our downstairs neighbor is "into" that stuff I suppose. You can also just barely smell the incense, along with cigarette smoke, when you open the food pantry in the kitchen. Just a friendly reminder to mind our neighbors. There ya go, Jenny.
There isn't much room: a small bathroom with a window and a built in medicine cabinet whose mirror is permanently scuffed so that the reflection looks like an unfocused digital camera shot; a great kitchen with yellow walls and a window that looks out on the far left side of the great oak. Then there is a bedroom, dainty, and a wide odd-shaped living room we've painted green with the most fabulous four windows. The oak tree, which wraps itself around our entire half of the upstairs in a great hug, dangles leaves around the windows and casts an even more greenish tint on the room. Entirely winsome, the small space is pleasant and alluring and ours.
There are hardwood floors throughout the apartment, except in the kitchen and bathroom where there is tile. All of the misfit doors with their crystal doorknobs get stuck when they've been closed all the way, especially when the windows are open and it's rained or is raining. We've got some great furniture, hand-me-downs and a few generous wedding gifts, and a lot of photographs. There are few outlets--2 in the entire kitchen. One on the footboard just inside the doorway and one up toward the ceiling above the refrigerator. One on the footboard in our bedroom. We've got about a dozen extension cords to access electricity, running all up above door frames and down wall corners. And the windows... o, the windows. Did I mention how fetching the windows are?
Above my desk there is a black and white portrait in its original mahogany frame of my Grandaddy Jack. He is wearing a gray suit and a dark tie and he is holding a smoldering cigarette in his right hand, his elbow propped up on the desk before him. He looks like Steinbeck in the picture, sophisticated and entirely brilliant. The photograph is the perfect crest to the perfect writer's haven.
