In looking back over the decades living in this house, I am realizing how many memorable moments have been made around the two tables in our well-worn home. I guess it stands to reason that the place where family and friends come to eat together would emerge as a center of home and its welcome.
In every season the table is where special holidays are celebrated. At the end of every workday and workweek, it is the food, family, and fellowship that brings us all home. Christmas parties, Thanksgiving dinners, intimate Valentine desserts, Passover and Easter rituals, summer birthday parties, graduation gatherings—great memories of all kinds—are honored around the table. Indeed, so much of what we have all become after spending our lives together as a family has been informed and influenced by experiences around these tables.
Both the kitchen table and the dining room table at our house seat ten. In the beginning, we chose big tables because we wanted to always be able to “set another place.” But it has been not only meals together that have shaped us, but the conversations and shared activities at these tables. The tables were often spread with homework, poster paints, family puzzles, writing projects, and remodeling plans.
The tablecloths, runners and centerpieces have chronicled the changing of the seasons. Around these tables kids, grandkids, and their friends have made valentines, colored Easter eggs, strung Christmas garlands of cranberries and popcorn, and played dominos and Scrabble.
Here at these tables we have discussed our faith and our doubts, cried and prayed over lost loved ones and broken relationships. We have laughed our heads off and been silent over disagreements. Through the seasons and the years these old tables have been a magnet for feeding both the body and the soul.
Soon these tables will draw us all home again to give thanks for the years and miles and to remind each other that there will always be a great table, where our place will be set and our special chair will be waiting. Yes, there will always be a place at the table at the end of our journey home.
