I’ve been buying tablecloths. We have one table only in our small home, and it is a new table, purchased after twenty years of using a secondhand table, a crack in the base zip-tied ten years into the using. Our new table extends to fit family on days when we all come together, and we still all come together, happily. I speak of my nuclear family, my husband and three twenty-something children who each have a steady life-partner now. Yes, everyone comes together and is happy to do so. How different from my old nuclear family of three, the family in which I was raised, where there was brokenness from the beginning, so coming together ended early on. 

My new tablecloths are colorful and joyful, fat tropical flowers in reds and greens, or smaller, shier flowers, yellow, and red too, bobbing on a background of pink. I change the tablecloths each week, and I rub and straighten them each day.

My mother draped no tablecloths on our apartment kitchen tables, but the tables had been meeting places at times, while she chatted on the coiled landline that sprung from the wall as I listened on the chair across from her. And there were meals, too, even if simple.

My mother-in-law draped heavy crocheted and lace tablecloths in whites and beiges over her walnut dining-room table. This implied formality, but she was not formal and was merely holding onto Polish traditions. I have continued this tradition for holidays, which ultimately has brought me warmth and peace, something I can count on as life is a transient thing.

Though I love the dark wood of my new table, and though I keep a minimalist appearance in the rooms I inhabit, when I drape the cloth over the wood, the room changes. There is a settling. The table demands to have sitters, and I happily comply. If I work from home, I set up my hard, black Dell atop the soft, floral landscape. Maybe my son will eat his lunch across from me as he breaks from his remote, mathematical internship. In the evening, as many as four of us may or may not sit down for a few minutes to eat and talk. Our sons cannot yet afford to live on their own, so they still call this house home, building their lives, their jobs, their dreams, and because of this, I do not know loneliness, and I have a reason, still, to buy tablecloths. We have built a life where no one is running away, where the table is the meeting place.

In Volume 5, Issue 2 of Club Plum, meeting places are found in hidden worlds, in letters to loved ones who left, in a deceptive garden, in a silent car, in the arms of a child, on the doorstep, at the tomb, and at the kitchen table.

Please join us in this meeting place. We are so glad you are here.

Yours in words and art,

Thea

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