MindSpinner

I was pushing a cart through Kroger last night when I heard someone call my name. I turned to see a woman I knew from the church of which I used to be a part. We’d worked closely together. We knew each other well in those days.

“I wanted you to know that I have your table,” she said.

My ex and his wife had donated what was our dining table and chairs to a church auction, and she’d bought it. It has been so important to expunge me from the house that is theirs that remodeling has extensive. Even roses and trees have been torn from the ground. All family pictures and videos have been turned over. The children’s remaining childhood toys came to me in boxes last year. I’m sure the family furniture I left so that my ex would have a bed to sleep on and a chest to put his clothes in are all long gone. I knew the table was slated to go, too - the children had said so. Having chosen it, I would have bought it, given the chance.

The table was solid cherry, with a natural oil finish and simple Shaker construction, elegant in its simplicity and as warm and unassuming as a farmhouse kitchen. We had bought leaves for it, so it would extend to seat children and grandchildren come home to visit. It had two drawers, one in each end, which made it a perfect place to store school supplies and do homework. My eyes stung a little when my old friend told me about the donation and the auction and the bidding - a bit of family given to the church all over again. She seemed sad for what had happened, too.

“I’m glad you have the table,” I managed to tell her. “I always pictured it with a big family sitting around it, home for the holidays.”

When you leave, you leave everything. Nothing will be as it was. My old friend clearly loves the table, asked how to care for it, about its history. The table will have a big family gathered around it - just different faces than I’d once envisioned.

The table I took with me when I left is years older - a small kitchen table made of ash, bought when we moved into our first house (not ours really, a parsonage). I’d finished it myself for our eat-in kitchen, coating it with four layers of polyurethane so that it would better weather years of everyday use. The faint scratches on the legs are teeth marks from our Sheltie when she was a pup, chewing as puppies must, twenty years ago. My children ate at this table in booster chairs, modeled creatures from home-made play dough there, drew their pictures, dripped their popsicles. Its knicks are a calendar of days, a record of years.

It may seem the lesser of two tables; it is not really so.