Story of a table

The house is full again. It feels sort of festive. My husband says we need to get a calendar to keep track of everyone's comings and goings at what he calls the Arrindell Arms Bed and Breakfast. The good thing about even one other person being here is I get up and get myself dressed every morning. No more working all day in sleep clothes. I did this even when it was just my own kids still living at home. My darling man is the only one who routinely gets treated to pajama days. There are also a lot of puzzles happening in this house lately. My daughter, my two nieces, and I are all puzzlers. I notice also that whenever I'm working on a proposal, trying to figure out the story's narrative arc, I tend to have a puzzle going. It's a kind of meditation, and sometimes connections happen in the background of conscious thought.

That's a new dining table from Restoration Hardware by the way. It is a sturdy, well-built thing. My newlywed niece and her husband didn't want to take it with them when they moved to Dallas last week, and so they asked if we wanted it and delivered it to us gratis. It came with two grown up looking brown leather chairs that are incredibly comfortable. So now the rickety but persistent cherry wood Ikea table that my dad and my husband assembled while I held my newborn son in my arms 27 years ago, and which served us so well through many puzzles, manuscripts and magazine stories, not to mention homework, science fair experiments, art projects and Thanksgiving feasts, is no more.