The Table
Do inanimate objects have memories?
My maternal grandparents purchased the mahogany Duncan Fyffe-style table in the 1930s. As I stood beside it wrapping presents, I wondered if furniture has memories.
What if this table absorbed the conversations around it during its 90 years of serving our Indiana family?
Now, the table's top is marred with places where hot things should not have been placed, scratched by children who should not have scratched, and darkened by time to a rich-reddish brown.
My grandparents purchased the table when they returned from the city to the family farm when my great-grandmother became ill in the mid-1930s..
When my grandparents built a house "in town" in 1973, the table held court in the new dining room. My grandfather died, and my grandmother rarely hosted family events but used the table as a repository for letters, pictures, and family history.
When my grandmother moved to a nursing home, the grandchildren selected pieces from her home. I was allowed to go first as the only girl among five grandsons. I picked the old table and the six wobbly chairs with maroon velveteen tops.
"Why didn't you choose the cane-backed chairs? They are so much sturdier than those old dining room chairs," my oldest cousin said to me.
Sturdy or not, the table and chairs meant living history for me.
My husband and IÂ moved the furniture to our little townhouse into a small dining room where the table couldn't open fully, let alone accommodate multiple leaves. But that changed in 1990 when we moved into our first house, and our child was born three weeks later.
On Christmas Eve, my parents arrived in a snowstorm 300 miles away. We lined the short driveway of our first real home with luminary candles in paper bags, lighting the way for the Christ child. Within the hour, my brother, his wife, and their six-month-old baby boy arrived from Iowa. The snow was coming down faster and thicker, and we were anxious over their arrival from Iowa.
That Christmas dinner burns in my memory, with our chubby and laughing son at eight months old. His cousin was a few months younger. We put the leaves in the table and used my grandmother's good lace tablecloth. We used the six wobbly chairs plus two high chairs.
Surrounding the table was so much joy, of a Christmas that could never be repeated, memories of two beautiful baby boys I continue to cherish. Later, we put the cousins in Santa suits, and they raced on the floor, arms and legs flung wildly in the arm; my son in his K-Mart too-tight on-sale Santa suit, and his cousin in a more tailored version.
Does the table remember the two little Santas, the green bean casserole, and piles of half-eaten Cheerios on the floor?
Does the table remember when I was seven? Go back to 1964, and the table is set in a large dining room with a huge glass window displaying the family farm's expanse, now fallow after harvest. The fields are covered with a coating of snow, and the sunshine breaking through grayish clouds makes desolation beautiful. Our family of four drove seven miles from town over the river and through the woods to the proverbial grandmother's house.
Does the table remember a petite, pigtailed girl helping her older sister set the table during World War II? The table sat in the same place it would decades later when I ate Christmas dinner there with the larger family. Instead of a television in the adjacent room, there was a large battery-operated tabletop radio where the family listened to Fireside Chats from President Roosevelt.
I know a time is coming when I will no longer host family events that take three days to prepare and are over in an hour. My mother, who carefully hand-washed the silverware she gave me when she stopped hosting family events, is gone. God-willing, my son and his cousin, who gave us a Christmas morning saxophone and baritone concert while clad in their plaid bathrobes, will grow up and create their own lives.
Will the table, so precious as to be loved enough through nine decades, remember?
