the Saturday Breakfast Serial

What is the Saturday Breakfast Serial?

Welcome to the Saturday Breakfast Serial!  I'm trying an experiment here to breath new life into my neglected blog.  So I thought it would be fun to work on a story in weekly installments.   It's an experiment, so I guess I will just have to see how it goes.  I'll do my best.  After all this is how I started writing Tea With Whimsy.

This first one will probably be a short story, possibly told in only two installments.  I don't have a title, so I'll just call it...

 

The Desk

       In my house is an old desk.  The kind that people used to call a secretary.  A beautiful piece of oak furniture with intricate carving on the front.  It was here when I moved in, apparently left behind by the previous owners.  When I first saw it, I tried to open it, but it was locked.  I tried to contact the previous owners, but they wouldn’t return my calls.  I guess they didn’t want the desk.  I was only mildly annoyed that I couldn’t make full use of it, but it was beautiful and didn’t take up much room, and it did seem to belong just in that spot in the house.  I decided to keep my eye out for any keys I might come across at yard sales or second hand stores.  And maybe if I was lucky, it would turn up somewhere in the house.  Eventually, I forgot my mission to find a key for it.



I had been living in the house several years now, and one day I was raking the leaves in my front yard.  It was a beautiful Autumn afternoon, late in October, and the sun was shining brightly upon leaves of red and gold.  Occasionally the wind would blow through sending more leaves cascading down from oak and maple branches.  In those moments I would stop and simply watch the leaves falling, delighting in the way the wind would toss them once more into the air, and how the leaves would skip away turning cartwheels before it.
I had just turned back to my rake and was vigorously using it to toss leaves into the flower beds that lined the path to my front door, when I happened to trip over a fairly large round stone, one of many that lined the gently curving bed.  Having knocked it out of place, I bent down to replace it and saw an object which caught my attention.  It was encrusted with soil, but even so, I could see it was a very old, very rusty iron key.  And I suddenly thought of the desk.  Leaving my rake leaning against the front porch, I rushed indoors to scrub clean the key.  I couldn’t wait to try it.
After rinsing layers of caked on dirt from the key and scrubbing the rust off with emery cloth, it seemed ready to try and I headed for the desk.
Just as I approached the desk, there was a knock at the door.  I hesitated longing to ignore the interruption, but the struggle was only a brief one and my own good manners won out over my desire to satisfy my curiosity.  I slipped the key into my trouser pocket and went to answer the front door.
I opened the door to find one of the neighbor kids standing on the front porch holding my rake.  He wanted to know if I needed help with the leaves.  I knew this boy.  He was a good worker and so I told him to go ahead with the raking, and to come see me after.
It seemed that I was not destined to try the key anytime soon, as next I was interrupted by a phone call, which led me to my lap top and from there I was kept busy with some work online for the next hour.  I looked up and realized that my helper outside would probably be finishing up and since I had some cookie dough chilling in the fridge, decided to bake a batch of cookies to further reward him after his long hard work.  After all, I reflected, money isn't everything.
It didn’t take long for the scent of fresh baked cookies to make its impression.  And I found myself faced with not one hungry 9 year old, but three.  That’s some powerful magic I thought to myself, putting the plate of snicker doodles on a table on the front porch.
I paid off my young crew of workers and spent the rest of the afternoon talking to neighbors drawn by the social atmosphere seeming to emanate from my front yard.
Naturally I forgot all about the key until days later when I was doing laundry and came across the key while going through my pockets.

Come back next Saturday for another installment of the Saturday Breakfast Serial.