Meditation: On Kitchen Tables

Years ago, at a country auction, I bid on a small, slightly wobbly, painted kitchen table. Five dollars and a nod later, I took it home and set about refinishing my prize. I stripped away the nineties dirt, the eighties white, the seventies avocado, the sixties lemon, the fifties salmon, and finally, along with seared lungs and blistered hands, I was left with a small, slightly wobbly, wooden kitchen table. With a giant scorch mark in the center that no strategically placed trivet could ever hope to hide.

The scorch mark was just the size of a cast iron skillet. Was it a mess of cornbread that had made its mark fifty years ago, or fried chicken, or gravy, or a Dutch baby? Was it good news or bad that caused the wielder of that hot pan to lose her head and leave it on the bare table long enough to scar?

I'll never know, but I did learn two things: first, for that distant family as for mine, life happened at the kitchen table. Or, as Joy Harjo puts it, The world begins at a kitchen table. It's the place where we linger over coffee and crosswords, build cardhouses, do homework, pick fights, break news.

And the second lesson? Some things are fine just as they are, no refinishing required.

Photo credit: Art Holman (that's me in the onesie, next to the gravy boat)

Comments (15)

Thank you for sharing - wonderful poem as well. Regards, Beth

Oh for a kitchen table. We didn't have one when growing up. We had a kitchen counter, long enough for 3 kids so my 2 brothers and I would have our breakfast cereal there, our grilled cheese and tomato soup there, our porkchops and veggies there, looking out the window in front of us. We did have a dining table but it wasn't used very often.

Reading about the scorch mark on the wobbly table makes me wish my parent's kitchen was configured differently as to accommodate that wonderful kitchen table.

Hey Anne,

Are you the same Anne that was at the AD Show- Zia Priven?

al, yes I am. Or maybe I shouldn't admit that. Umm.

Hey,
I was at the show and saw you but did not get a chance to say hello. Either you were busy or I was. Al (from EA)

OMG, that was YEARS ago. Wow.

I don't work for ZP, just doing the show with them. It was fun.

I have met them and they seem like really nice people. Sorry I didn't get a chance to say hello. Was that you with the paint project a coupla days ago too? OK, so I'm an AT junkie.

Yeah, painted a section of my apt. last weekend after deliberating on the right color for almost 8 months. Personally, I think it looks great!

Every now and again, I've found myself wondering, "Is Anne ever going to decide on a paint color for her bedroom?" It looks fabulous! Very chic and coordinated, and just the right color to make the space look warm yet soothing.

My second cat is still trying to figure out how her clone got into the "before" photo.

Yeah, right! I'm sure you pondered the color choice for as long as I did :)

Here's a great picture of Mattie. Does your cat look like him?

Um. sure have drifted far from the kitchen table but then again, doesn't everything happen there anyway?

His blaze is centered differently, but as you can see in the linked photo, Terpsichore is constructed along roughly the same lines.

I'm trying to decide what color to paint my kitchen table, a concept that links both the topic and the paint problem...

Adorable!!

Lovely post Shannon! Years ago when I was in grad school, my husband and I took a trip to England and when walking the streets of Cambridge at dusk, I peeked into a lit apartment (hey, hey... you know we all do it!) and saw this woman sitting at a round kitchen table with a light overheard reading something and sipping (I like to think) some tea. Something about the whole setting made me long for that.

Now I have a round kitchen table and since I have a fetish for tablecloths, I put one on it and covered it with a thick piece of glass, with bevelled edges (this last item was a proud dumpster-dive find). It is a couple of inches "short" all around but doesn't bother us. I have a fake artichoke lamp hanging above on a dimmer.

On evenings when I can sit there with a cup of tea while dipping into M.F.K. Fisher's omnibus 'The Art of Eating', I feel a comforting kinship with the stranger I spied on years and years ago.

And someone will peek thru your window one evening and carry that moment with them for years and years. How lovely.

In the late 70s/early 80s I lived on the UWS in an apt. below the sidewalk. I had a round table that used to belong to my grandmother sitting close to the window. I also had a floor vase with white branches covered in twinkle lights sitting near the table. One night a friend and I were having dinner and I looked up to see a stranger standing on the sidewalk looking in and smiling. After dinner I went outside to look in just to see what they saw. It was pretty nice.

Hopefully, strangers all over the world are looking in with admiration at a cozy kitchen table scene and will remember it for years and years.

My brother was soldering something on our dining room table (we used it for everything: homework, crafts, eating) and accidentally burned a 2" diameter spot on the top. My crafty dad bought a pre-made wood inlay of a flower and put that into the spot. It actually made the table more interesting.