Shortly after Kelsey was born, we moved into a four-bedroom home
that was everything we thought we could ever want in house (except it lacked a
fireplace). Of course it didn’t take long to figure out that even this new
palace had some limitations. The kitchen, although a step up from the kitchen
in our former home, was long and thin, not quite big enough to be considered an
eat-in kitchen, but we found a table that would work. It, too, was long and
thin, with drop leaves on the sides. When we weren’t eating we could put the
sides down and slide the table against the wall, creating a small enough
footprint that we could still move about the kitchen.
The table came as a kit—unfinished, precut pine and
hardware. I would have preferred to stain it before assembly, but the timing
didn’t work out, and one day when I came home from work, my husband and my dad
had it ready and waiting for me. Eager to get the project done, I purchase a
combination stain and varnish that I imagined would save time, and I applied two
hasty, uneven coats. Not my finest work by a long shot, but we had a table.
Pine is a soft wood, so it didn’t take long for our family
to make its mark on the table’s surface. Lots of it was just the wear and tear
of daily use: the accumulated marks of dozens of practice spelling tests,
glitter glue that refused to come off, wear marks from placing plates in the
same places for hundreds of meals. The table was well used and well loved; day
by day we built our family around its edges.
When we moved into our current home, I almost immediately
began to think about getting a round dining table, since it would have worked
so well in the space, but other priorities emerged, and we continued to create
memories over meals and projects. More marks and grooves found their way into
the surface, and more family members took their places around the table’s
weathered plane, and they, too, have left their mark.
When we adopted, we kept Lewi’s name but not Lily’s. It was
a difficult decision, but we were concerned that her birth name would not be
well received in the US, so we made it her middle name and dubbed her Lily instead.
But in the early days, when she was first learning to write, she would ask how
to spell her Ethiopian name, and she would practice with a slow, deliberate
hand, her handwriting so strong that she engraving DORKA through the paper and into
the tabletop. It endures, as proud and defiant as her spirit—a symbol of who
she was and in many ways still is.
We recently acquired a small round table for the kitchen. I
would have liked something a little bigger, but the price was right, and it fit
into my Prius. With the leaf in it, it’s just about perfect for the four of us
who are still living here full time.
With a replacement in the kitchen, I moved the old table to
the garage so I could do a little maintenance. The finish had gotten sticky, so
I sanded down the top so I could re-varnish it. I didn’t even try to sand out
the imperfections; even my sloppy finishing work is still visible. All of these
things are a testament to the family, to the story of our lives. We have grown
and changed much around these pine planks. It is our flaws that make us who we
are.
