Our Kitchen Table {P,f,h,r}

Our apartment is large, but faced with the choice of a dining room OR a craft/sewing/computer room, I decided to serve dinner in the kitchen.  Real.

My Dad re-purposed my table when the college he worked at bought new library tables.  He cut the top in half, and sanded several year’s worth of love note carvings off the top.  He knew that we’d be moving a good deal too, so the leg section unscrews.

Just before Dad died, when we moved into the apartment, he sat in my kitchen corner at the window with his coffee cup resting on the window sill.  He watched Dan’s brother’s friend assemble the table for us.  He had great satisfaction in seeing how easily the table had moved, and how easily it was re-assembled.  He was only well enough to come over one more time, but I still think of it as Dad’s window.

There are no leaves to my table.  Sometimes at parties I stand at the counter, and hope other adults will too.

Meals go on the table, including birthday parties where the requested desert was rice pudding, so I held a taper for the birthday child.  Funny.

And school lessons, (real)

and Lego Club (happy)

We have to clean it up several times a day.  School projects tend to be done on the kid’s bedroom floors (they want a folding table) or on my craft desk.

Since Dan walks  home for lunch, we all eat all three meals together each day (after picking up the school stuff.)  I need to make a new table cloth (or two)  I need to get the kids to set the table prettily more often. Perhaps some day I’ll replace the mis-matched dishes with a matching set (one friend dining with us said, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but THINGS are not important to you.”) But meanwhile, keeping it simple, we are keeping it together.

Side note: Rejoice with me!  I’ve had a major peace accord with the landlord’s groundsmen!

When they began to replace the wooden retaining wall, and the wooden edgers from my island beds, I asked them if  they could extend the beds until they hit the retaining walls.  They brightened up because this will mean less tricky mowing this summer, and it’s easier  to install right now.  I’m also hoping for less weed-wacked flowers.  As a gesture of good will, I pruned the budlea hard (it whacks them in the face when they mow).  I’ll go easy on the ‘trailing plants that soften the hard edges,’ too.  We’ll keep those edges hard, so it’s easy to see what is lawn, an what is not lawn.

It will be so pretty.