Kitchen Tables

Our new kitchen table and chairs arrived last week. When you make a purchase based on a digital rendering on a screen, you’re never quite sure what you’re getting. But this set is exactly what we wanted— beautifully distressed and swirled wood complete with “wormholes” handcrafted by Amish cabinetmakers in Ohio. Counter-height swivel chairs offer a better backyard view of wild birds at the feeders, deer in the fencerow, and our dogs on squirrel reconnaissance.

A young family with four kids and three dogs bought our old set. They didn’t mind the worn finish on the top or a few blemishes on the chairs. When I offered them free tablecloths, they said no, because some child or creature would pull on a tablecloth and send everything to the floor. I’m delighted that a boisterous young family will be eating messy meals there while surreptitiously slipping bites of food to their dogs. I hope they play board games and do homework on it and leave a few more watermarks from abandoned drinks on the surface.

That table and chairs served us long and well. When we first moved into the house, we thought the sunroom would be a place to sit and watch the world outside surrounded by three walls of windows. But we soon realized that’s where we wanted to eat our meals, so we found a table and four chairs perfect for that space at a now long-defunct furniture store. Even when holidays or hosting guests sent us to the dining room, the table still served as a bar or place to hold plates of appetizers and snacks.

Our kitchen tables are humble workhorses, rarely bedecked with centerpieces or fancy crystal and silverware like their upscale dining room cousins, but their beauty lies in their everyday usefulness. We’re hard on them with our spills and messes and inadvertent scratches. We cover them with laptops and work papers and general household detritus.

But kitchen tables are there for us. They see us sipping tea and slurping cereal in our bedraggled morning states. They hold the pizza and take-out boxes when the cook in the household is off duty. They bring us together with close friends and in our case, family members now gone to glory who frequently shared dinner with us on Sunday evenings. I can still see each of them sitting in their respective chairs doing a post-mortem on what happened in church that morning.

The kitchen table is where we sustain ourselves, both physically and mentally. We are drawn to a piece of furniture that allows us to stop and at least temporarily set down our burdens along with our plates of food. A place to eat a sandwich or sip a glass of wine and let a feeling of safety and comfort  wash over us. By passing bread, refilling drinks, and clearing plates, we serve others at our table, often those we love. The kitchen table is where we exchange a glance with someone and giggle or question whether what they played is a legal Scrabble word.

We’re getting used to our pristine new table. It’s a little bigger and needs round placemats instead of tablecloths, and we’re in that oh-so-careful stage of using coasters and wiping up spills immediately. New connections and new memories will be made around what may well be our from-here-to-the-home table. But for now it is enough to share meals together while watching the Downy Woodpeckers on the suet feeders as the squirrel peers in at us from the patio post and the dogs wait patiently underfoot, hoping for something to drop.