The kitchen Table

Remember when everything happened at the kitchen table. Growing up breakfast, lunch and dinner was served here and everyone was expected to show up. As a kid you were held hostage until you asked to be excused. Hard decisions were made with elbows on scratched wood. The good plates were brought out for birthdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas… and set up just a bit more fancy than the usual. Kids arguing, laughing, playing when they shouldn’t all happened there. Bad news was gently given…usually served with a cup of coffee or glass of sweet tea. Happy news was served with the same drinks at the same table. Everyone had “their” chair. Once claimed it was yours forever. The table has food stains, hot mug rings, and permanent pen marks that are now a… permanent… part of the wood. The kitchen table tells a story. It is, or was, where life was lived.

We do a family Christmas Eve dinner every year. It is one of my very favorite days of the whole year. Just us, and my dad, together eating too much food and telling too many lies. Our table is antique. That creaks if you look at it wrong. Every chair protests loudly when someone sits down and I love it madly. Each year my dad will sit down, hear the chairs creak, and proclaim “I am going to get some wood glue and fix these things!” And then life moves on and he says the same thing again the next year. This past year, my husbands chair decided it had enough mid way through dessert and just….quit. It not so politely imploded and dumped him straight to the floor. I do not mean it leaned to one side or one leg gave out. As my dad said “Hell, one minute you were there John and the next you weren’t”. I was sitting next to him and watched the whole thing happen in slow motion. To which my son said “its like he fell…but then kept falling.” As John laid on his back like a stuck turtle in the middle of chair debris… chair legs and arms spread out like a halo around him, I started laughing and could not stop. We were all laughing. It is now one of my favorite memories on one of my favorite holidays. And it happened at our table.

Things are different today. Sports, after school events, late work hours, blended and extended families all going in different directions at different times. Technology ripping us from one another. Taking up space and transporting us to someone else’s table, life, experiences instead of meeting at our own. Usually while sitting AT our own. While I do recognize that times are different, I am left with the question, what is today’s kitchen table equivalent? Where are hard conversations and beautiful conversations had? Are kitchen tables left unmarked and lonely, begging for memories to be made? Has tech distracted us so much that we have forgotten the little joys in precious spaces? I do not have the answers. But what if. What if we made the kitchen table a sacred place again. What if we set aside a day each week to connect. Eat dinner together. No devices. Just unrestricted face time. What if we sat in the sticky awkwardness with our teens, the silly frustrations of our littles. It feels right. A bit like coming home.