WHAT I TREASURE
Scrubbed wooden top with a grey chalk paint base. Legs with small chew marks left by a labrador puppy. Flecks of glitter in a crack from a long-forgotten craft project. A notch in one end where I once foolishly tried to use it as a workbench. This table, passed through three generations of my family, has absorbed the story of my life.
Once, it lived in a farmhouse kitchen and my grandmother spent decades kneading dough, preparing apple pies and carving Sunday roasts on it. It held the Brown Betty teapot, dispensing cups of tea and Welsh cakes to visitors. Gangs of sheep shearers and haymakers crowded around it at the end of busy summer days. Now it lives in my house and is an essential part of daily life. From my first morning mug of tea with a now elderly dog lying at my feet, rushed breakfasts before school and work, to evening meals gathered around sharing our day’s news.
The table came to me when I was pregnant with my daughter. As poor students, we had no TV and no sofa so we spent her first Christmas around the table – a blur of eating, breastfeeding and card games. Every celebration since, every birthday cake, every Christmas dinner, every party, has used that table. Craft projects of mine and the children – glue, glitter, paints, sewing machine. Between Christmas and New Year, a 1,000 piece jigsaw is slowly constructed on its surface with room at the edges for cups of tea and cake, and it’s host to Monopoly and epic battles of Risk. My endless piles of marking get done on it and so does the children’s homework. Shopping bags are dumped on it before the contents are put away. Many groups of friends have gathered around it, sometimes with tears or raised voices but always laughter. My book group argue over novels and wine choices. Family meals from the times of sticky toddlers in highchairs to nervous boyfriends meeting the parents. It’s my cooking surface when I need more space – chopping fruit and vegetables for jam and chutney or making pasta. Now it’s moving with the times as it’s become the computer desk for laptops and the resting place for charging phones.
Flanked by wooden benches and a solid wooden chair at its head, reminiscent of the one my grandmother used to sit in, dispensing wisdom, sweets and pocket money to us. I think of her often when I look at the table, especially when I continue with her tradition of making bread on it. One day it will become part of my daughter’s house and family – as long as she promises to bake bread!