One of the few drawbacks of living in Paris is the feeling of being separated from your roots.

I don’t mean family, who can almost always visit or be visited. I mean not being in the place where most of my cultural references were formed. Instead, I live where aging rock singers, and old TV shows, and even snack foods of the 1960s, are largely unfamiliar.

Maybe that’s why artifacts from my childhood have so much meaning for me. Like the antique roll-top secretary that stood in my parents’ Ohio living room for almost 50 years. It was a fixture of their lives, starting when they brought it home from an auction when I was 11 or 12 and continuing to their 2013 downsizing and move to Fort Collins, Colorado. With golden wood and graceful proportions, the secretary was the loveliest piece of furniture they had.

When my mother transferred into memory care last year, it went into her storage unit. (That’s the bottom half behind the file cabinet.)

 

And there it sat. My sister Christine, who lives in Fort Collins, didn’t have room for it. I badly wanted to move it to Charlie’s and my house in Staunton, Virginia. But how? Moving companies said they would have to charge a full truckload price for it — $25,000, say. That put a pall on my dream.

And then Maddy, a young family friend, came to Paris and got in touch. Delighted, we invited her and her partner, Mike, over for dinner. He mentioned that he owned a custom-furniture company near Denver. It created beautiful pieces that, I realized later, must have to be shipped one by one.

A few months after that dinner, I contacted Mike to see if he might have any shipping advice. He offered, incredibly generously, to build a crate for the secretary and get a quote from a shipping company he used. When it came, the price was right. I just needed to get the piece to Broomfield, about an hour from Fort Collins.

I was going to be in Colorado in mid-January and decided to do it then. Some say it takes a village. This effort wasn’t quite of that magnitude, but an amazing team turned out to help.

First thing that morning, in 11 degrees Fahrenheit, my nephew Cameron (an amazing musician!) and a friend loaded it into Christine’s truck. They slid the two pieces onto blankets she’d provided and dragged them into place – a tight but perfect fit. Cam is in the truck bed.

 

 

 

 

 

I then drove back to Christine’s house, where my brother-in-law Brian tied the two halves down securely.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And away to Broomfield I went, getting lost only at the very end. Mike and his colleague had the pieces off the truck and onto the forklift in a jiffy. On top of the section on the floor is another item I shipped to Virginia that I’ll describe later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I went back to Fort Collins and then Virginia. Mike built the crate and off it went.

Photo: Mike Sagan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few days later, I got a call from Roanoke. My secretary was coming.

 

 

It wasn’t easy: Our house is on a steep hill and we are having gutter work done (or, actually, not having it done, but that’s another story.) There was no way the delivery people could carry the crate up the hill, especially through that nest of ladders and even if their big truck could have blocked traffic for that long.

Instead, I told them, come along an alley in back to the parking pad behind our house. But the truck couldn’t make it into the alley, so they had to trundle their cargo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Their job was to drop and go, so I had hired another team to do the last stage. Brian and Randy uncrated the secretary, brought it into the house and set it up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From there, all it took was a little cleanup.

I can’t describe how moved I was to see the secretary in my house. I opened every drawer and nook, running my hands over the wood and recalling what had gone in each place: Checkbook and check stubs in the sections of the big drawer, family photo albums stacked vertically in the hutch, bills and envelopes in the cubbies. The roll top stuck when I opened it in just the place I remembered.

And my nostalgia was enhanced by the other piece I shipped from the storage unit: a painting by the late Anne Culbert, a noted Southern Ohio artist and the mother of one of my best friends from childhood. My memories of Anne are as old and vivid as those of the secretary, and I had loved this image for many years. I’d packed it in bubble wrap and begged Mike to find a way to get it into the crate. He did.

When I look at the secretary now, I see not only my memories of the past in Ohio, but a reflection of my lives since then: Virginia, in the house we have owned since 2018. Colorado, where my father lived his final years and where my mother remains. And Paris, where the connection was sparked that made all this possible.

Pin It on Pinterest

Discover more from Anne Swardson

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading