Climbing out of the Blue

I sit in my sunroom office at a nicked, chipped wooden desk that was at Good Housekeeping Magazine for years and years, in the old days. Its one drawer has tarnished metal pulls--almost like dangling Art Deco earrings--and sometimes refuses to open, as if it holds secrets it doesn't want to share. There's a little round lock on the front too, though the skeleton key has gone missing.

It came home with me in the 1990s, in our little blue Honda Civic, when they were ready to throw it out. But what did it hold in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s? Back when women wore hats and gloves and typed at clunky manual Underwoods. Did it conceal extra white gloves? Teabags? Sanitary napkins? Lorna Doones for an afternoon nibble? Or just an editor's trove of red "nick and pull" china markers, a black-collared loupe and carbon paper?

Does it hold the dreams of a young woman who wanted to write, who was paid to write, but had bigger stories to tell than those woven from words like chopped beef and fine wool? Does it harbor memories of broken hearts, or of broken lunch dates? Of career girls, of Seven Sisters graduates? Socialites who lived on Park Avenue with their parents and worked just until the ring from Tiffany came, along with the fine china?

Was there depression back then? Was there a name for it? Was there time for it? Studying this drawer and all it held and holds may lead me to the answer.