If Our Tables Could Talk!

​During the quarantine, I’ve enjoyed seeing some TV personalities broadcasting from their family tables with their kids in their laps!  It has gotten me thinking….

”What stories would be told if our tables could talk?”

The table pictured here is the 70+ year old dining table my parents had built out of pine trees cleared from our farm. Our home did not have a dining room, so every morning and every evening, we pulled the table out into the middle of the living area, pulled up the sides, held hands to say grace, and ate.  Then we put the leaves down again and moved the table back to the corner of the room. 

These are my grand nephews, my parents' great grandsons, playing trucks on our family table.  How thrilled my parents would be to see this table still creating  new memories!

​Unfortunately, this table was also the victim of my love for trimming things!  It still bears three marks from when I took a hand saw to it!

​Something scary usually happens when I start trimming things!  I can easily get carried away, whether it’s trimming bushes, or trimming hair.  This week I did both!

​After 10 weeks of no haircut, I finally took “scissors” into my own hands and attempted to give myself a haircut.  If it weren’t for my husband trimming the back for me, I would definitely be sporting a mullet!  It reminded me of the time I hid under our dining table and cut my own bangs.  Doesn't every kid do this?

For me, this table represents good memories, as well as some painful ones.   Nightly dinners and holidays at this table were certainly a source of stabilization in my life.   Sometimes however, this table was not only a hiding place for me when being mischievous, but also a place to hide from difficult moments.  Like the night, only 3 months after this picture was taken, when we were in the middle of dinner and my father came home from the hospital, knelt down by the table, and told us that our mother had gone to heaven.  I crawled under the table and cried.

In some ways my memories around this table similarly reflect what we are going through as a human race right now.  While this corona virus is tragically taking lives away from some family dinner tables, at the same time it is bringing other families together around the table in ways they might have never imagined possible. Let’s make the best of what we are given.  Let’s laugh, love, cry, talk, learn, grow, and pray.  We never know when it may be our last time together around that table.