Written by the Chivomengro Staff

LUTE

There’s a crack that runs down my dinner table back home. It swells up in the summer, nearly mending itself on especially humid days. In the winter, the dry air widens it like a fissure in the sole of a foot. 

The table itself is a circle of gleaming wood that consumes the square dining room. My grandmother has religiously shellacked it for as long as I can remember, and I mostly recall the somehow infinite, somewhat offensive-smelling ancient tin can. 

Summer lobster dinners, countless birthday cakes, and bounties of holiday cookies have found themselves on the table year after year. The crack has been covered, and uncovered, and covered again by tablecloths. Sage green for Thanksgiving, bright red for Christmas. 

Dining room windows allow a perfect view of the Maine coast from the table, a view that’s always stuck in the back of my mind. The strong maple branches, expansive ocean, a distant bridge. In darker hours, the windows turn into mirrors that reflect familiar faces and tapered candles that drip, threatening to marr the polished surface. 

When I think about sitting at that table, I feel a sense of eternity. Sometimes eating dinner felt like a moment that would never end. Not in a negative way, really, just in a way that emboldened the weight of time. The ticking of the grandfather clock and the flickering flames could be hypnotic.

Somehow, though, all of those dinners added up to so many years. So much time. And now, I barely sit at that table. I will, over my Thanksgiving and Christmas break again for the next few years, probably, but after that there’s no way of knowing for sure. There’s no telling how many more times I’ll be able to see that table, or look out to the bridge through the windows, or watch the crack close up on a warm day. 

ABI

When I was in elementary school my dad had a farm with acres and acres of land. He would cut down trees for firewood to heat our home. When looking around the property he found some ancient pine trees and cut them down. He had a wood miller and sliced this giant tree into one-foot wide by five-foot long planks of wood. He took three planks of wood to make the top of the dinner table. He also milled the wood for the rest of the table. I remember the fist-sized knots that littered the wood, adding so much more character to an already one-of-a-kind table. We actually had a dining room in the big old farmhouse we lived in, so the table fit perfectly in the room, not taking up too much space. When we moved out, we took the table with us, but it would never fit perfectly in a room again. The house we moved into was tiny and narrow but we kept the table; why get rid of a table made with so much love, care, thought, and time?

We left our mark on that table. Pine is a soft wood, so if we used too much force coloring, writing, or drawing we would leave little indentations of our creativity. Bled through markers, paint, and crumbs in the large cracks between the planks have been left on the table, marking our good use of it.

Over time it’s been our breakfast table, craft table, refreshment table for parties and many birthday celebrations, and of course the dinner table. The more we grow, the more we grow away from the table. Hanging out with friends, bringing dinner to your room, late nights playing sports, no one home at the same time to share meals with, but the dinner table is still there waiting to comfort a lonely diner. Kids have moved out and schedules have changed, so with the wave of motion the once lively dinner table that housed many beautiful meals has been subject to change.

It was always too big for the space, but with many bodies surrounding it, and being covered with a spread of food, it was just right for the space. With the lack of use, it became a nuisance and an obstacle. So it went away, like the kids that moved, like the shared dinners, and put in its place is a soulless, modern, not one-of-a-kind table.

Since I moved away I had to make my own dinner table. A dinner table came with our apartment, a soulless, modern, MDF table lacquered with black paint with a burn spot from a hotpot. We don’t use the dinner table often, but when we do it’s magical. We have used it for birthday dinners, takeout meals we want to share together, and to host dinner parties. So I realized that it’s not the table, but what we make of it. The food we make and the people we share it with are what make it special, but I still miss the dinner table my dad made. There was a soul in that table that breathed in the forest where the wood once stood.

JULIA

The first dinner table—surface of light (beech?) wood, legs painted white. Six chairs, one bench. My guinea pig’s cage is along one of the walls behind the table, below an arrangement of decorative plates. The other wall has two picture frames on it equidistant apart, but the contents evade me. I don’t remember much about these dinners, except for when things went wrong: The dog leaping up to steal my dad’s hotdogs, the times my sisters got in trouble for burping at the table, the time I got in trouble for repeating the word sewer over and over again (I had discovered that it sounded like sue her, so technically I wasn’t talking about anything dirty). 

Most of my memories of it are from non-dinner times. The breakfast when I lost my appetite for the cinnamon sugariness of Life cereal after my sister began puking in a floral-scented trash bag in the adjacent room. Or when I couldn’t breathe and I’d sit at the table with a nebulizer in my mouth, waiting for my lungs to fill up again. After falling off the bar stools I was told to stop balancing between, I watched my great pool of chin-blood travel towards the table, where my sisters had been doing their homework; I got a line of stitches and a bag of chocolates for my misadventure. Sitting down at that table, I wrote a letter to Obama on colored construction paper, in which I mostly expressed curiosity about his dog, Bo; he replied. 

Right before we left that house for good—three of us going to one, smaller house, and one of us already in another—I sped my scooter around the empty space where our table had been. Perhaps I was placing a curse with my wheels, expelling the memories from my brain, or I was just scratching the floor. 

GRETA

Eight chairs surround a large, rectangular, oak-stained table. The overhead light is at its highest setting and you can’t help but wince. Six of eight chairs are occupied, the other two rarely used, unless I decide to put my foot up or lean an elbow to feed the dog a dry piece of chicken; I tried broccoli but she didn’t seem to like that; the new dog does though. But now I like the broccoli, it’s good for me and I’ve grown a taste for that sort of thing. 

I was always the slowest to finish my meal, thus I was always the last to be sitting at the dinner table.

“Mom, can I please be excused?”

“You can be excused once you’ve finished every last bite. I’ll sit with you.”

By now, all three sisters are back up in their rooms, doors shut, on the phone with their newest obsession and/or bad influence—which is always an interesting paradox. I’ll never become a bitchy, hormonal, teenage girl. I’ll stay her baby forever. 

“Promise me you won’t turn into another mean teenager. Promise me you’ll stay my baby forever.”

“I promise.”

But, of course, all good things must come to an end. And soon I would stop participating in the nightly debrief of my day at the dinner table. Instead, I would be too stoned to look up from my plate; pushing around the same piece of broccoli for ten minutes, and then silently excusing myself.

All of us mean teenage girls have flown away, buying our own shitty dinner tables that will last until we find something better left on the street. We come home for holidays and other celebrations, and our chairs are there waiting for us. We’ve come home for this, to sit and not get up until the talk runs out or our train leaves soon. 

I’m coming back to you; I always will. 

JORDAN

LILLIAN

When I think of my dinner table, the only thing that comes to mind is the big nice one we used to have in my childhood home. I lived there until I was ten. The table took up most of the space in the room. It was dark brown and old with clawfoot feet. We only sat there during Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, and to eat cake on birthdays. Once, at probably eight years old, I was struggling to draw the back leg of a dog, so my dad scooped up our dog Buddy and placed him on the dining table. He stood there, confused, as my dad showed me how his back leg bent and curved. I drew dutifully from his instruction, and I still remember this dining room table lesson whenever I draw an animal’s legs. I also struggled immensely with math through every year of my life, and I remember sitting with the first math tutor I ever had at that table. She was probably fourteen while I was barely ten, clutching my pencil and staring at her with horrific fear as she tried to explain long division. I immediately burst into tears as she very awkwardly continued to try to teach me. I remember brushing my pencil shavings off the glossy surface, tears still falling. 

Our dinners there were boring (to me), always full of way too much adult talk while I was bursting with excitement to finish my food and lunge under the table. I would crawl around under the creaking canopy with my brother, poking peoples feet and laughing way too loud. Our parents would often “excuse” us early, and we would hand-and-knees scoot from the dark underneath to the kitchen, so excited to be free of sitting politely.  We were barely allowed to touch anything in the entire room. Nice candles we never lit, a fancy bar cabinet no fingers were allowed near. 

When we had to move, our table was given away to someone I didn’t know. I used to sit underneath it and trace my tiny fingers over the scratches and dents of its great clawed feet.

PARKER

I have several dinner tables in my life. These tables are filled with the people that matter most to me. My father has one, with blue painted legs and a beautifully stained top. My mother’s is oak, with a raw edge. I’ve got a seat at my best friend’s table, and one down south too. I had started building you one, but it was never finished. 

The seating arrangement at my father’s table is the same at my grandmother’s. Her space is always there. A table built on family values. I sit with my step mother to my left, my brothers across from me, and my father at the head next to my step mother. We used to watch television at the kitchen island for dinner at his house, but that was before he’d found someone. Now it’s hearty meals that my stepmother has spent hours on, she’d come from a more traditional home. The men wipe the plates with their bread until you can’t tell whether the plate is dirty or clean. 

My mother’s table has lived in several houses, and has had several types of chairs. For a while they were high backed zebra prints, then there was a church pew for a while, and now they’re simple, and nice. A table that had traveled, an environment that had shifted. But the people we’ve found who sit around are always asked to be there. Each of them wanted just as much as the others.

My best friend’s dinner table is a circle–endless, and inclusive. There isn’t anyone you can’t see no matter where you sit. The more people you pile in, the more elbows and shoulders, the closer you are, the closer you’ll feel. The wood always seems to be warm, like you’d been resting your arms there a while. Vegetables grown in their garden, served with the chicken she had raised herself, all cooked by her mother’s hands. They’ve known me since before I knew myself. 

At my table down south form doesn’t matter–only the welcome does. At times my seat has a nice back, other times it’s a bench, a box, or even the coffee table dragged close. Point is they always make a spot for me. Even while I’m up here, with the wind biting at me, and a cold front pressing in, I know my spot’s still there. Should I arrive on the doorstep tonight, they would slide their chairs over bringing me in. It was a different kind of family, one misfit joining after the other. This table wasn’t built on blood. But we are a family, and Laura looks after all of us. It ain’t matter none where you came from, what mattered was the hand you lent to help, and the gratitude you gave when someone filled your plate. 

Not every table is complete, some remain in pieces. I spent hours measuring ours out, cutting the pieces for the table we would spend our lives at.  Each board sanded smooth, each leg strong, sturdy. Meant to fit perfectly, built to last generations. But by the time I got all the pieces laid out and sprawled across the floor I realized you weren’t ever coming back. I sat alone in the shop, covered in sawdust and sweat, and I waited longer for you than I care to admit. When the sun rose, I stacked the pieces neatly. They’re still there waiting. If you ever come home, I’ll have it built and ready in a day.

The dinner tables in my life are markers of all the love I have gathered in this world. Some are far away, one remains unfinished, but their seats are never truly empty.