The Bureau

If you walk into my bedroom, you'll see a bed, a plush purple chair, a table covered with various odds and ends, a wall plastered with musical memorabilia, a bookshelf, and a bureau

with three drawers. To tell the truth, I really don't like the bureau that much. I think that it doesn't match the mood of the room, it's too small, old, hard to keep organized, and the drawers can be a pain to open and close. The bottom drawer doesn't even have any

handles on it anymore! (The handles have managed to come unscrewed, and I haven't really bothered to take the time to fix them.)

Anyways, over the Thanksgiving break I had time to organize the wrinkled clothes that had been hastily taken in and out of those creaky old drawers over the past few weeks. As I cleaned out the top drawer, I noticed something that had been concealed by ratty t-shirts and old socks. A name was scrawled on the inside with Sharpie marker: Anna Lloyd Rohrer. I knew that Anna Lloyd was the name of my mom's mother. She passed away about a year and a half after I was born, the day before my brother was born. The only memories I have of her are from some old photographs that lay around our house. It seemed strange to me that her name was scrawled into the old bureau that I disliked so much. Had it been hers? Why did she write her name in it? It wasn't like she would carry a bureau around with her and lose it, like a book with a name in the front cover.

It turns out that my great grandmother, Louise Martin Nagel, wrote her daughter's name in the bureau in order to make sure that it stayed in the family when she died. Throughout her life, Louise had lived through as many as three house fires. Due to these fires, a bunch of the family

memorabilia was lost, and not much of the old furniture survived. When she became a mother and a grandmother, Louise wanted to make sure that all of her treasured family belongings were never sold outside of the family, so she wrote the names of her three children inside or on the back of nearly everything! Furniture, china, not even photographs were spared! Ever since then, the furniture has been passed down throughout my mom's side of the family. I was given the bureau, my bed, a mirror, and a few other pieces on my first birthday. There are so many other pieces in my house that were passed down in this way, including a rickety highchair, a baby pram, and a cradle.

This tidbit of family history has raised my respect for that old bureau in my room. Even though it may be old and brown, it manages to add a little bit of history to an otherwise teenage room.