My Mother’s Desk

Abstract

My mother Martha Bacon wrote sitting upright, back straight at a desk. It wasn’t always the same desk because my family moved so many times, zigzagging across the country from Rhode Island to California and back, with stints in Boston and New York City. Wherever we lived, a desk, borrowed or bought second-hand, stood in a room without a door but that still provided my mother a modicum of privacy to write. Covered with her papers and notebooks in tidy stacks, her desk nestled in its semi-private space was a sign that we had settled in one place, at least for the time being.