We rarely sit at the kitchen table - a big glass affair made out of iron ivy which I painted a glittery purple with bronzed Raku leaves. There's a green spider plant suspended from where the legs meet, a bitch to water. When I was in high school, family conversations were strained, and became more stressful as my teenage years progressed, so by the time I was a senior I would do anything to get out of dinner. It's no wonder that now we never sit at the dining table to eat.
Sometimes we'll do a puzzle on the table, or I'll pop one of Chip’s photography lamps underneath and turn it into a lightbox for an art project. It belonged to his mother, and he used to eat breakfast at this table when he was a child. Now it's the space for painting watercolors, paying bills, or simply being a clear surface, a place for the ephemera of life to land, emptying grocery bags or opening packages from Amazon.
I remember this table in Helen's house after she passed, then it sat in our backyard for years, the pale green paint slowly flaking off and rusting. I worried the cats would eat the paint flex and be poisoned, so sometime during COVID I sanded and painted, brought it into my office, and used it as my desk for the ubiquitous zoom meetings.
At some point, when I decided to start offering Reiki again and needed space for my massage table. I sold the blonde wood kitchen table that I had bought at Sweets-In-The-Nude when I first moved here in 1994, but kept the chairs. Usually we have only two at the table - one of the others is upstairs in the bedroom for me to fling my work clothes on, the last one sits in the back room, a makeshift shelf for the box of stuff that Chip is supposed to scan, file, and shred. That's another story.
I remember this table in Helen's house after she passed, then it sat in our backyard for years, the pale green paint slowly flaking off and rusting. I worried the cats would eat the paint flex and be poisoned, so sometime during COVID I sanded and painted, brought it into my office, and used it as my desk for the ubiquitous zoom meetings.
At some point, when I decided to start offering Reiki again and needed space for my massage table. I sold the blonde wood kitchen table that I had bought at Sweets-In-The-Nude when I first moved here in 1994, but kept the chairs. Usually we have only two at the table - one of the others is upstairs in the bedroom for me to fling my work clothes on, the last one sits in the back room, a makeshift shelf for the box of stuff that Chip is supposed to scan, file, and shred. That's another story.
