thirteen | november writes :: on my table

 Before I was married, before I ever lay eyes on my husband, before we were bound in matrimony and our lives entwined forever by the babies we made, I knew that a table would be central to the family life I hoped to create someday. In my often tired-of-the-rat-race daydreams, I wistfully imagined a long oak table, a sturdy remnant of a forgotten age, one that smelled of old wood, woven with trains of grain criss-crossed across the top; a farm table, a monastery table, long enough to seat 6 or 12 (or 20).

As I have always loved to cook, coupled with a deep desire to know humanity better, I knew very early on I would need a table to host the armies of folks I imagined traipsing in and out of my house, through summer harvests and breaking bread, through the holidays, sharing pies and jams and turkeys. Something to feed the small troop of boys I knew I would someday have.

Sometimes I imagine that The Table is an actual archetype, never imagined or thought of by Jung, but exists in the dreams of childbearing women across the world: the center, the hearth, the place where all is set aside and all are fed.

Despite my deep dreaming desire for the table of all tables to fill my farmhouse of a home, we instead have a medium-size table sold and bought, years ago, from a big box store. But it does its duty well. It is the place of writing and painting, of babies making messes, of boys older, working hard on thoughts and dreams and work. On any given day it holds several plants, a bowl or two of fruit and a pile of breadcrumbs and small milk-rings from glasses drunk.  And it fits, ever so perfectly, into our tiny urban homestead inside the vast metropolis in which we live.

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excuse the rambling.

 joining in with amanda, write alm, and other fabulous folk

for november-prompt-a-day