Three Tables

Debi Goodwin on braiding history with hope as a prelude to letting go.

A refinished table sits in my basement. Waiting for its next chapter. As am I. In a few weeks I will put my house of a decade up for sale in a very uncertain market. I don’t know how long it will take to sell my house or where I’ll go next. In the meantime, I walk from room to room imagining what my new space will be like and what will become of the belongings of my lifetime and of generations before me.

As adults, we may start with a room, then an apartment, and, if we’re lucky, a house. Then perhaps a bigger house. But there comes a point when we start to reverse the trend. My next house will be smaller. Belongings will have to go. But not the table. I still have a ways to go on that reverse trend and time to make new memories to add to its collection of old ones.

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I remember my mother sticking the names of her children to tables, chairs, lampshades and vases. And I remember her looking at each item she’d given me as if acknowledging it one last time with dispassion as I put it in a box or carried it out to my car.  

I only have one daughter and last summer, when she moved into her first house with her young family, I started the process of letting go. I gave her the L-shaped couch that we’d sat on for years to watch DVDs, I gave her chairs I didn’t need anymore, dishes I never used and one table that was precious to me.

It was one of three that my father made for me when I was starting out. He created them from the parts of old kitchen tables he found in my grandmother’s barn after she died, in the same house she'd been born into. From bases thick with paint and grime, from random legs discarded in a corner, my father carefully stripped the wood frames and legs, and built new tops from old lumber. I gave my daughter the largest of those tables. Now, each time I go to her house, I sit with her family around it for meals and know the history of my grandmother’s home and my father’s love has moved to a new address. I finally understand how my mother felt passing on her wedding gifts and inherited treasures.

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I still have two tables. One is simple, small and made of pine, and it fit in the dining nook of my first apartment with my first husband. The other is more elegant.

My father built it from a walnut base and carved walnut legs. For the top he chose to use a single pine board he’d found in the barn. The board was old and so wide – about three feet across – that we knew it came from the original forest on the escarpment above the town where I grew up, a forest which had long ago disappeared for the homes and furniture of early settlers.

My father was a capable carpenter but a hobbyist so he decided to entrust the board to a professional carpenter to plane and mount on the base. When we got the table back, we discovered the carpenter had sawed the ancient board in half and glued the two halves together so the top wouldn’t warp, he said. We were disappointed but my father, being a kind man who knew how to get along in a small town, didn’t complain. And I learned there are some mistakes that can’t be fixed and have to be accepted.

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The tables have moved with me through the years, taking up different duties as needed, in the kitchen or hall, holding plants, and even serving as a dollhouse for my daughter. When my second husband and I took early retirement and moved to a small town that we loved, we kept only the furniture that suited our forever house with its mid-century vibe. We had no space for the three tables but I wasn’t ready to give them up. As the movers unloaded the tables, we said just to leave them on the deck under a canopy until we figured out where to put them. At the end of a long day of unpacking and settling in, as the light was fading, we pushed the two biggest tables together and ate our first al fresco meal in the peace of our backyard garden. And we decided that joined, they would become our patio table.

We ate all our summer meals on those tables, drank morning coffees and played our daily backgammon games at them. I bought a checkered plastic table cloth to protect the tables from rain and moved them into a shed for winter.

Time together in our new house was too short. My husband received a cancer diagnosis a year after our move and died the next year. In my grief, I forgot about the tables. The wind pushed up the tablecloth without me noticing or caring; driving rain pounded through the finish and attacked the wood. Before winter that year I had a friend help me carry the ruined tables to the shed and the next spring I bought a bland-looking table from a big box store for the deck.

My father’s tables stayed in the shed until I refinished the large one for my daughter. And this winter, I dragged the walnut-legged table to my basement where it remained until I got around to sanding the legs which I had to nourish with a product that feeds wood. The legs were so thirsty for attention, they needed two good soakings.

The top was more of a challenge. The finish had lifted and rain had turned the wood gray in spots. I sanded the top heavily to reclaim a clear surface, working my way up from the roughest sandpaper to the finest. Even so, I was left with signs of damage to the original board, spots from old spills, shading from different sanding pressures and gray streaks from the rain, too deep to erase. I have always preferred to leave wood as natural as possible but this time I wiped a walnut stain over the ancient pine to recover its aged patina and even out its flaws. Still, through the final clear finish the marks of my life and the trials of the tree show through and I’ve decided that’s just fine. The table bears the work of nature, the care of my father and, in a now darkened slash where the gray was, my profound grief over the death of the love of my life.

The finished table is showing me a new future, allowing me to see myself in a kitchen somewhere. The walls around me are unimaginable, the location of the house unknown. But as in a spotlight, I am sitting with a coffee, creating new scars with spills and the impressions of a pen before running my hand over the table’s surface and remembering my past until I am ready to pass this table on, too, and let go completely.  

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 Debi Goodwin is a former documentary producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her books include the nonfiction memoir, A Victory Garden For Trying Times, on grief and gardening, and the novel, Rain, at Times Heavy. She has written for Certain Age previously, speculating about Thelma & Louise in their later years, and on finding optimism in small things.

Images:

Table by a lake by Adam Davis

Wood close up by Amr Taha