Thursday, June 2, 2016

A Drawer from the Past; or, What Tales An Empty Drawer Can Tell

Why does this drawer look so familiar? Where is it from? Marash Girl struggled to put the drawer in context.  It took Marash Boy to remind her of the story that the drawer told.  To prevent the then newly acquired antique Empire Bureau from being stolen from the never locked cabin, she had insisted on removing one drawer from the bureau that sat in the middle bedroom in their summer Wilbraham abode . . . a trick she had learned from her antiquing friends.  Whenever they saw a bureau on the sidewalk that they could not tote away without the help of a truck, the antique dealers would lay claim on  that abandoned antique bureau by simply removing one drawer, and taking that drawer with them, for, after all, who wants a bureau with a missing drawer?  We know now that tornados make no distinction as to whether or not a bureau has a drawer, a bedroom has a bureau, or a cottage has a bedroom . . . no distinction whatsoever, as the arms of the Wilbraham tornado, on June 1, 2011, took bureau, bedroom, cottage, and all, five years ago yesterday.

[And speaking of empty drawers, let's think about the 8 empty drawers in the desk pictured below, the desk without a top!  Not a tornado, but a family on Eldridge Street, a Newton Corner family that sold their house and emptied their garage, abandoned this desk full of empty drawers and untold tales . . . what stories those drawers must hold!]

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