Written by Kirsten Marino Walz – It was a dog day summer evening when she saw the thing, discarded on the curb. Elise had just begun her walk and as she traveled up the sidewalk, there it sat amid refuse bins: an old dresser, looking almost forlorn and reminding her of the dresser she’d had growing up.
What color? Red? Red painted oak? She’d forgotten all about it until that moment. Elise began to visualize her dresser and to recall that it had been striking, a thing of stylish ruddy beauty. Her parents were a couple of hipsters – musicians with a deep appreciation for the arts and a keen aesthetic sense. Expectedly, they’d collected some outlandish (though quite posh at the time) furniture: there were very few straight lines or sharp corners – everything was rounded and shaped in asymmetrical curves and waves.
Their living room’s furniture, with its curvy forms and arrangement, practically spelled out the word groovy. But it was the red dresser that became a key participant in Elise’s adolescence. It doubled as a shelf for valuables, a custodian of beloved beings like her favorite stuffed animals and pet gerbil. Elise had taken a picture of her dresser once. But she hadn’t realized how much the mirror would magnify the flash and the most prominent thing in the photograph ended up being a brilliant, white-gold burst – a star-like eye that appeared to her all-knowing, looking directly at her from her favorite piece of furniture. It seemed she was viewing an as yet undiscovered aspect of her dresser, like it had revealed itself to her more fully.
The dresser became a silent, seeing witness, a sympathetic confidante in her magical, wistful world and a bright, cheery, red receptacle for tears and triumphs. It was at times a massive and complicit smile, though at others, a great crimson gash when Elise was feeling upset and dramatic in her childhood angst.
Now, encountering the dresser on the curb Elise felt tempted. Stalwart and taller than it was wide, the dresser was clearly old yet had only minor chips on the lower two drawers and barely discernible scratches all over. Mostly it had pleasing, practical lines.
But she considered the years this dresser probably had behind it and the things people habitually put into dressers – things besides clothing – the remnants of which she felt certain she could feel emanating from its still, closed drawers: echoes and agonies of birthing children and the ensuing busyness and sleeplessness; memories best not entertained but tucked away safely in a drawer; more benign remembrances like those of boots scraping mud across a clean-as-a-plate pine wood floor; dark sorrows and bright joys that come with living eight or nine decades; tender tears of long and large living.
Those were someone else’s belongings the dresser sat teeming with, and they couldn’t be disposed of or adopted so easily. No, Elise thought better of acquiring for herself someone’s abandoned dresser from the nighttime curb. Its drawers are too full. There is not room.
