telling stories

If you have been to our home, you know that we are not ones to own heirloom quality furniture, pieces that will be passed down to future generations. I love a good deal, and I also don't want to have the same thing forever. So our furniture is a mix of Ikea, rummage sale bargains, Slumberland deals, and Gypsy Moon finds. My home will never be featured in Architctural Digest, or Home and Garden. Maybe Bargain Monthly?

Our dining room set was purchased from friends of our parents, before we moved into our home in St. Paul in 1992. They had bought it for their summer home on Lake Bemidji (their regular home was in Idaho). It is simpl,-a round oak pedestal table with four windsor type chairs. It had a matching corner hutch, but since our 1930's era house already has two built in hutches in our dining room, we really didn't need it, so my sister took it off our hands.

If that table could talk, it would tell you about the times I sat at it, late into the night, working on stock status reports and orders when I worked at Target. It would tell you about the times I used it for cutting out patterns, and both of the cats would jump up to 'help' me, laying all over wherever my scissor needed to go.

It would talk about all of the times I used it to wrap Christmas presents, late at night after the guys were in bed. It would tell you about the countless numbers of sugar cookies that have been cooled and decorated on it's surface. It could describe Charlie's birthday parties, Thanksgiving dinners, and before school breakfasts, Mike with his bowl of oatmeal and the newspaper spread out before him.

It would tell you of the many hours it spent covered with black fabric, my sewing machine whirring late into the night as I sewed light shrouds for our simulators. It would talk of being overloaded with computers and receipt printers and monitors as I tested out the POS system for our new store at the Mall of America. It would describe being covered with models and merchandise as we planned our displays for the store. It would talk about Charlie covering it's top with newspapers, so he could carve and paint his Pinewood Derby car.

And then it would tell you, that it's favorite job is the one it holds most evenings, when the three of us gather for dinner, and tell our own stories. What it doesn't know is that it's about to be replaced, with a fancy new model I found at Ikea. But we won't be able to part with this bit of our family history, it will go into storage, until we move into a bigger home, and need a spare table to sew, or wrap presents, or decorate cookies, or host Charlie and his friends playing cards. So it's days of story telling aren't quite finished yet.

EDITED: And now it is going to add more chapters to it's book, my sister and her son are going to use it in their new home! (she offered to babysit it for me until I move into a new house, which may be never...)