Carrie's Secret Drawer

When I was in middle school I convinced my mom that what I really needed was to have the family's secretary desk live in my room. I was sure that with all the little cubby holes for letters and things that the desk would be the organizational kick I needed to go from being a good student to being a great student. I imagined I would go from being a person who kept piles of paper to a person who kept things neatly tucked away in cubby holes.

I also really liked that I could fold up the desk part when I wasn't using it. In my mind the secretary desk was like the mullet of desks. When I wanted to dance around my room to my CDs the desk part would be out of the way. My current desk has this fold up feature as well. Since I still organize in piles of paper instead of cubby holes the table part has never been folded up.

my current desk

My mom loves to vacuum and hates my organizational system so maybe she thought the cubby holes would help. My mom put the secretary desk in my room and I was in heaven. I never met my mom's dad who was the original owner of the desk but when I was a kid I used to imagine him doing all sorts of cool, official things at his desk. I even found some old envelopes tucked between the cubby holes and the top of the desk. I was sure they belonged to my grandfather and that made them cool. It didn't take long before I discovered a secret drawer in the desk where I decided to keep notes from my friends and things I didn't want my parents to find.

The secret drawer

Apparently my secret drawer is no longer all that secret because my brother found it and likes to look in the drawer when he goes to visit Mom. Fortunately all the $100 bills that I used to keep there are long gone. A lot of my friends from middle school and high school know about the secret drawer. My mom calls it Carrie's secret drawer which makes me feel like even though everyone knows about it that it is still mine.

My stepdad forgets about the secret drawer and so when he cleans the desk and finds it there is always the thrill of discovery.

Since everyone knows about the secret drawer I started leaving notes in the secret drawer for my family.

When I was at the conference a couple weeks ago one of the presenter at the fantasy session I went to talked about secrets and how it is important for characters to have secrets. Naturally I thought of the secret drawer and how I thought it was the coolest thing when I was a kid. It was this place where I could keep things I wanted kept secret.