Our Dining Room Table

In our home (at least since we've had the dining room table where it is) we most always have fresh flowers and candles framing the edge of the table.  They sit on top of a linen table runner - usually one from Sweden, and sometimes they coordinate with the colors of the season. There are oftentimes books/papers/projects/Pokémon cards/art supplies/laptops, etc. strewn about the rest of the table. Our table is 104 inches long, a great length. Luckily, there is still space enough to eat meals. It's sometimes messy, though more often than not, cleaned up and beautiful. In the winter months we use up a lot of candles.  We enjoy the soft, warm glow of the flame, and we have lots of them. Usually, one of the boys lights the candles. I think my favorite candleholder is a very solid, very heavy, black dala horse that we bought in Sweden more than 19 years ago. But I also like the orange, modern candleholders too. Our table is worn and tired. Though it is also soft and cozy.  It's ordinary and marvelous at the same time. It is an old oak table that we bought secondhand twenty years ago and have coveted ever since. I want the boys to remember our long wooden dining room table with the flowers and candles and the books and the papers and the junk that sits upon it. I want them to remember the countless meals we've had around it, both formal and informal, both delicious and awful; the countless evenings of homework; the hours and hours spent playing games; the amount of dough we've rolled out for pies and cookies and dumplings and even croissants. If this old table could speak it certainly would tell us how happy it is, how warm it is, how central it is to the hum of our life. I think it really appreciates us. 

If this old table could speak.