My house on the outskirts of the town of Farragut will be 31 years old in December. While we have done some updating through the years, there are a lot of things that we bought when we moved in that are still in use.
One is the solid oak kitchen table – a pedestal round that becomes an oval with the addition of a leaf. My mother bought it for us as a housewarming gift when we finished building the house. It is gouged in several places (Cub Scout projects), bleached white in others (trying to get out permanent marker) and a little warped (“Please, stop leaning with all your weight on the table’s edge!”)
It needs to be replaced, or, at the minimum, refinished.
It won’t be. Why? Because it has these beautiful gouges from eight Cub Scouts sitting around making leather belts, and it has these character-adding strips of white with flecks of green from a Mother’s Day card project gone crazy, and it leans just slightly because a 9-year-old jumped up on it for some random reason.
The kitchen table is a place of memories. And it is a place where problems are solved, issues are discussed, announcements are made, tears are shed and thoughts are explored. Talk around the kitchen table could be important, trivial or somewhere in between. It was always a shared conversation about something or someone that was interesting, funny or heartwarming.
Once a week, on Thursdays, I will be sharing some Kitchen Table Talk with the readers of KnoxTnToday.com. Some of it will be about Farragut and West Knoxville. Some of it will be about other things or people in our community. It will all be community based, and, I hope it will all be interesting, frank and refreshing.
Gather at the table with me and let’s have a Kitchen Table Talk.
Next week: Leaving the mountaintop for a week at the beach.