There’s a crack down the middle of my kitchen table. You can’t see it anymore. You can feel it if you know where to run your hand — a faint seam under the finish, right where the two halves of the top were pulled back together.
The table is somewhere around a hundred and fifteen years old. Built, best we can tell, between 1910 and 1915, with fold-down sides so it could shrink against a wall when it wasn’t needed and open up when company came. It isn’t fancy. It’s a farm table, the kind that got built to be used rather than looked at, and it’s where we eat breakfast, where we eat lunch, and where most weekend mornings I set my iPad down with a cup of coffee and think about the day before the day starts.
We didn’t go looking for it. We go looking for old things in general — estate sales, garage sales, antique stores, the kind of Saturday where you drive around with no plan and a little cash and see what somebody’s ready to let go of. My wife and I have done that for a long time. Some people collect a thing. We collect the habit of looking.
A few years ago we pulled up to a garage sale and realized we knew the people.
The table was sitting out there with the rest of what they were selling, and it had a problem. The top was split right down the center and they didn’t know what to do about it. It had been in their family the whole time, as far as they knew — more than a century of it — and now it was cracked and they were moving things on.
We stood in that driveway a long while before any money came out. Where it had come from. How long they’d had it. What it had been to them. They told us and we listened, and then we paid them a fair price and put it in the truck.
My father-in-law is a carpenter and a very good one. He’s shown up here before.
We took him the table and he repaired the top, closed the split, made the two halves one piece again. I did the rest, which was mostly getting the fold-out sides to swing up and hold the way they were supposed to instead of sagging. Nothing about it was hard for him. It took me a couple of tries.
Now we sit at it every day.
I like to think about who else has. A hundred and some years is a lot of breakfasts.
Somebody sat at it at two in the morning with a cup of coffee going cold, trying to decide something. There were arguments at that table and there were the mornings after the arguments. And there were a hundred meals nobody remembers, because they were Tuesday.
I don’t know any of that for a fact. But I know tables, and I know families, and a piece of furniture doesn’t make it to a hundred and fifteen without sitting at the center of a great deal of ordinary life.
We’re careful with our things, so I expect it will outlast us.
But what I keep coming back to is that it had a family before it had us. It wasn’t ours to find. It was theirs to let go of, and they let it go to people who stood in a driveway and asked about it first.
That’s a handoff more than a purchase.
So we look after it. We’ve added a few years to the count.
This morning it held my coffee.
David Willis 