around the table

It's true what they say: "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." This can be true for many things, but most recently, this has especially been accurate in regards to our dining room table and not having one.

Last September, our previous landlord decided to put the house on the market to take advantage of  sky-rocketing home sales and we found ourselves needing to find a new place to live within 45 days.  All of that was a monumental headache that I don't care to revisit, but the story has a good ending considering we found a bigger, better, newer home for only $45 more a month than we had been paying. God paved the way to make it all happen for us, we secured the house and moved in last October. However, since the move we've been dining room table-less as we scrapped the set we had because all of it was falling apart.  We ended up using a card table and folding chairs in the new house so the kids would have a place to eat and we grown ups have been sitting on the couch eating on our own. It's not ideal, but it's been a temporary solution until we were able to save for something new.

The neighborhood we moved into is a brand new, cookie-cutter housing development full of simple yet nice homes. Our neighbors are pretty great and relatively easy-going. I feel like we walked back to a place in time where neighbors talked to each other, and asked to borrow a cup of sugar on occassion like the 'good ol' days.'  One of of my neighbor-friends picks Jacob up from school every day and we've been invited to a few get-togethers and parties. But our neighborhood is neighbors helping neighbors with any number of things and it's the first sense of community I've had in a very long time.  The subdivision Facebook page is where we all go to chat about all of the neighbory things - like when the farm next door accidently lets their cows out again and they walk over to eat everyone's perrenials from their neatly landscaped front yards. This group has become especially important to keep up with as all delivery services in this neighborhood seem to have a difficult time deciphering address numbers and street names and we are all picking up and taking packages to correct addresses on a daily basis. It helps that everyone is friendly and packages make it to the right place eventually.  

Just two weeks ago, my youngest came to me and asked if we were ever going to eat together as a family again because he missed it. Waves of guilt came over me because I had no idea when we were going to be able to purchase one and naturally, I have had my eye on something specific and expensive. Saving for what I really wanted was going to take awhile, yet here was my child asking me to be more present with him in the evenings around the dinner table.

Saturday, someone posted on the neighborhood page about selling their old dining room set.  He said it was a bit worn out, 15 years old, but still in great condition and wanted $100 bucks for a large rectangle table AND all six chairs. I reached out to him immediately to claim it and to our delight, he was only a few houses down on our street so we were able to carry everything from his house to ours. It's the exact shape I wanted and since it's all real wood, I can sand it all down and paint it to my desired color which is still undecided between ivory or a very, very pale light blue. I've also never refinished anything before, so this will be interesting. (Stay tuned)

We had our first meal all together around the table since we moved into the house last October.  Travis threw some burgers on the grill, I put some tater-tots in the oven, set out carrot sticks and made a huge pitcher of Koolaid. We sat at our new-to-us table and ate our simple meal on paper plates and we laughed and talked and told stories. I could tell that all four of our children were happy to be sitting together with us and each of them had something to say about what it felt like to sit around a dining room table again. There was nothing fancy about the table, or the meal we had prepared, but the simplicity of sharing a meal brought joy and contentment to all of us in one way or another.

If the last couple of years have taught me anything, it's to take nothing for granted; people, health, income, family, air conditioning, cars with good gas mileage, friendships, school-teachers. COVID has had to grow and stretch all of us in uncomfortable ways, and for me, finding contentment in what I have, and being at peace with where I am have been the biggest places of growth for me. Travis and I have been in crisis-survival mode since the week after we got married due to one unforeseen hardship or another.  He recently started a new job and we both finally feel like we can see the light at the end of a very long tunnel, though the state of the world right now makes us both acutely aware that we could lose our desired way of life at any moment just like we did in 2020.

I'm over the moon about this dining room set, even if it's my most unfavorite color of wood and I don't like the fabric on the chairs. I'm grateful to have back what we had lost. Because now I know, exactly what we have.