The Table

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.