ikea desks and bad bookshelves

There's no rain to wait for today, but still I sit here with a coffee and ponder awhile before heading out for my run. I wrote around things yesterday rather than through them, but it cleared enough of the to-do list to give me some breathing room.

I'm sat at my dad's desk instead of my own. Mine's in my room and I find it somewhat tough to work when I know my bed is behind me. My father's retired and so his desk goes much unused. It's become a storage shelf for the mountains of paperwork having a pension generates. There's also an unused MacBook Air, one of the "Fenway Bricks" with his name inscribed along with the years that he was a batboy for the Red Sox. It's not his proper old desk, sadly. That's in storage. This thing came from Ikea. I helped my mom build it some years ago. On the wall to my left is a large, Victorian print of Boston from the air. It's only just occurred to me that it must have been sketched from a hot-air balloon. On the wall in front of me is my dad' degree from The Naval Academy, the odd commendation and a beautifully calligraphed print of The Prayer of a Midshipman. Next to these is a window that looks out onto the back garden, where the leaves seem greener than they should at this time of year. The other half of the room is the library, though it represents so small a percentage of the family's books that it seems a bit of a misnomer. The rest are in storage. Next to the horrid black bookshelves are tall stacks of volumes for which there is no room. There's a tv in here as well, but you'd barely notice it if it wasn't on. 

We moved in here in a rush, in 2006. Our old house sold and we had nowhere to go. I found this place for my folks as kind of a stop-gap, as somewhere nearby to set up home until something better came along. We didn't want to sell the old place, but shit happens.

I don't feel quite at home here, which is fine, I won't be here for long. I'm used to a sense of displacement. 

But nor do my parents, which is a shame as it is their home, or what's passing for it at the moment.