Here’s another five minutes (and more) of free writing on a one-word prompt. This week, it’s “table”. Head over to Kate Motaung’s site to learn more about Five Minute Friday.
The massive mahogany table with its ornate chairs dominated her dining room. There was a narrow path between that table and her napping cot along the back wall, and between it and the matching buffet on the side wall. The bathroom door squatted in the corner, and the narrow wooden stairs to the mysterious second floor stretched up behind the front wall.
Grandma was as old-fashioned as they come. Sitting at her table meant eating home-cooked meals, carried one platter or bowl at a time from the hot kitchen on a steaming summer day. It meant laughter and stories. On Sundays, it meant dark-clothed adults seriously discussing earthly and heavenly issues, mixing farming talk with the Scripture studied that morning in their home church group.
My sister inherited the table. After years in her basement, it passed to me.
I used it. My children grew up knowing it; but it was a different table. It no longer sat in state in my great-grandmother’s two-story house. It now hunkered against the wall, a battered anachronism in our modern split-level home.
Its hinged sides lifted up occasionally for special events, laden with a variety of foods and good cheer. More often it served as a grooming table for our Lhasa Apso, who left claw marks in its no-longer-pristine veneer; or a storage spot for containers of Christmas cookies ready to be shared with family and friends; or a convenient surface for stacking magazines and books.
[STOP]
It was never the centerpiece of our living. The chairs had no seats anymore and were stashed away, but the table remained. It was used, well-used and often-used.
It’s time now for it to go.
I wish my children could have the same sweet memories I do. They never knew their great-great-grandmother, of whom the table speaks to me. I was barely grown myself when she first saw God face to face. They’ve heard the stories, they’ve seen the few photos I took with my parents’ box camera. But what they have experienced with the table is different. Their memories are not mine.
And time goes on, each generation, each person experiencing life in their own way. What matters is that memories are built, good memories that can be drawn on in sad times or bad times, memories that link a family into an entity like no other on earth.
The memories remain. The memories matter. The table can go. It was a catalyst, and it has done its job.
