in my pine desk

My dresser is really an antique pine desk with 4 drawers, or what Wayfair.ca calls a "drop front secretary desk". The drawers hold my clothes and, in the upper part, there is organized clutter. 

There is some jewellery tucked into small boxes and a blue travel soap container holding a strand of moonstones. A ziploc bag holds charge cards I seldom use (one from the Bay another for our bank in Sedona) and  holds Brian and my records of vaccination.

Behind these cards is a small stack of yarmulkes, some from bar mitzvahs, and a single black one that was my dad's. 

There is also a heart-shaped cookie tin with Superman on its lid where an intricately carved ivory necklace and a simple ivory bracelet reside, no longer worn because of the ivories' origin.

My father's watch, unable to be repaired, is there too.

But what I see first when I open this desk is a photograph of me.  

It is part of a passport photo.  Removing my sister's and mother's images from this photocopy, I had used this single picture of me in a tiny collage, 

I look perhaps 5 years old, wearing a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and bangs cut in the manner popular then, and never seen today.

The passport allowed us to travel to Tucson, Az where my mum and I spent one or two months for me to get relief from my asthma.  

Memories of that time exist solely through photographs of me in jodhpurs sitting atop a horse named Jigger and a now-missing image of me with braids tied with beautiful ribbons, standing in front of a Christmas tree at the nearby clubhouse.

Yesterday, when I told a friend of the strong attachment I felt to this photograph of my young self, she asked me what I was like then.  Was I quiet? Shy? Outgoing?

 I said that I didn't know but that I remember my dad telling me that sometime during my time in the desert, I had started lying "rigid as a board" (his words) refusing to let my mother help me to dress.  

So I conclude that I was already strong-willed and stubborn!

But my attachment to the photograph rests less with who I was and more with the not knowing.

I think of that little girl just beginning her journey, not looking to her past or imagining her future.  

Unaware of the challenges and joys and disappointments that lay ahead.

Unaware too of the choices she would make.

                        I am proud of her!