The Kitchen Table, Much More Than Furniture

Dear Reader,
I wrote the following a while ago when the time had come to get rid of our old kitchen table. I hope this brings back similar memories for you.
— Al
The Kitchen Table
Time passes. Families grow. Change is inevitable, but memories, oh, how they linger.
Take the kitchen table, for instance.
On some unrecorded date, the decision was made that a new kitchen table was needed. The old one was, well, tired.
I say, “Rightly so.” Over the course of a quarter century, our family changed from two to three, then to four.
Without realizing, much of our time had been spent around that old kitchen table. Yes, a new table would have sturdier legs and would offer places for even more family members, so, for goodness sake, why linger over the thought of getting one?
To put things in perspective, the kitchen is, in our house, the spinal cord of the structure. The lazy, the tired, the dis-gruntled have the living room. The exhausted and ill have their bedroom. For the dirty and those of us pressed by nature, there is the bathroom. The attic is for “stuff” that should have been tossed, but wasn’t or cannot be ousted.
The pantry and the washroom have their place, but the kitchen is where life is centered.
Central to the center of that room is that old kitchen table. Drab, bereft of friends, it stood having served silently through decades as the thing upon which we ate our food.
It was more than a dining room decoration, it was the kitchen table.
Around it, our children sat as they did homework, ordered there by a stern mother whose no-nonsense attitude toward school work paid off later in life for both of them.
On it, babies were changed. They were lovingly placed upon it, gently laid by caring hands, on a bath towel, then pow-dered and diapered and readied for bed.
On it, in ample time for holidays, cookies were formed and placed upon baking sheets. Pie crusts were rolled by a mother in law who was close to her daughter, who taught cooking and baking and about married life, all around that kitchen table.
Upon its center were placed many birthday cakes whose numbers changed, as did those who ate them then passed into the ages. There were mothers and grandmothers who joined those earlier joyous evenings who are now gone, but never out of our memories.
Around it we laughed and cried. There were nights, early mornings really, when tears fell upon it from lost young loves.
But there were also the times of happy tidings that brought hope to our sad hearts, or new beginnings and dreams of brighter tomorrows.
Lumps of dough were kneaded on it that raised and then baked into loaves of bread, which gave delightful aromas not only in the kitchen but throughout the entire house, They started as the rudimentary elements of flour and yeast and other stuff, all on that kitchen table.
Thanks to leaves that were wisely crafted, the table had the capability to extend for holiday meals.
At those massive family gatherings, the loved and unloved sat close, shoulder to shoulder, it seemed, as we said grace to Almighty God around that table awaited steaming turkey and ham and vegetables and homemade gravy and wine to gladden the heart.
The old table had suffered spills and broken glass, and it had survived, unscathed to serve us another day.
Yes, at the start of each day, the kitchen table offered a place upon which the daily newspaper was spread. In time, those papers told of wars and new presidential administrations, of accidents and fires, and sadly, deaths of friends and relations. The news long vanished, but the kitchen table remained.
The table’s legs, well, they bore scuff marks, mute testimony to the toddlers who crashed into them with wheeled toys and tiny cars, trucks and trains.
A gash? How did it get there?
Why, I recall the day as if it were yesterday, and we were doing home improvement and, lazy me one night, needed to make one more cut in a piece of wood, and zip! The lumber for the job was severed, but the saw blade left its imprint forever, right there in our kitchen table.
Taxes were calculated upon that table by a math-savvy wife. The adding machine’s tape fell over the table and onto the floor, as if modeled after a boa constrictor, and the hours crept late into the night.
On that table, life insurance policies were signed after being dutifully instructed by agents whose final question always was “Do you have any questions?” The answer, of course, was always “Oh, no.”
College applications were filled out on that table. Later, resumes were nervously compiled upon it, first with an electric typewriter, later a word processor, and finally, were copy read after being printed on a computer printer.
Mundane weekly and bi-weekly accountings were made on the old kitchen table as paychecks were endorsed and check-ing accounts were balanced on it.
On the vintage table, too, was the Holy Bible placed for daily readings. On it, hands were placed in prayer, for jobs, healing, wisdom, understanding, and forgiveness for an array of transgressions.
To the outsider, it was a piece of furniture that had little value, much less any worth. If one was generous, the table and the chairs that went with it could fetch, say, $25, if that much.
The central part of the home’s spinal cord worth virtually nothing? How could that be possible?
Possible because absent the attachment we had to the old kitchen table, it was merely an artful arrangement of wood held together with metal brackets and screws.
Like life itself, the old kitchen table was worth little in its elements, but priceless in its sum to a family that loved it.