Memories living on at a simple wooden table
Nobody in the Leonard family remembers the exact year they found the table the second time.
They had piled into the old Ford station wagon and made the twohour drive to Grandma Wannemacher’s farm in Ottoville, Ohio. Their parents nibbled homemade pickles from the relish tray inside the old farmhouse. Outside, Tracey Leonard and her older brother Scott snooped in the abandoned milk shed.
On a high shelf, Tracey felt a rounded piece of wood flecked with chips of green and white paint. The rest of the family came out to take a look. The table was in pieces. “‘Oh yeah, that’s the old kitchen table. What’s it doing up here?’ ” Tracey remembered her mother saying. “That’s how we ended up with it.”
Tracey and her siblings always ate on a newer Formica table in her grandmother’s kitchen. But
the old wooden one was where Tracey’s mother had eaten meals growing up. Ten people squeezed in at a table meant for six at suppertime during the Great Depression.
“My mom would sit on Grandma’s lap,” Tracey said, recounting the story her mother had told time and again. “There were four boys, four girls, and my mom was the youngest. Grandma had to make sure all the food wasn’t gone (so) that Jean, my mom, would get food.”
“This big ol’ wooden thing,” her mother called it.
It was sometime in the 1970s that Tracey’s dad dragged the table’s parts from the shed, took them home, stripped and refinished them. A worn stencil on the underside showed it was made by the Mersman Brothers and Brandts Co. in Celina, Ohio, in the early 20th century.
On Murnan Road in Galloway — on the far west side of Columbus — the table found a new place, next to the kitchen with the avocado-colored refrigerator covered in contact paper, within plenty of reach of the long, curly cord on the rotary phone.
Tracey could not have known then that the piece of furniture her father stripped to its original wood finish would become the place where she would face her life’s most tragic losses but also experience her greatest loves. In the Leonard house on weekends, her parents’ friends sat at the table and drank beer over games of pinochle and euchre. And every Sunday morning, Tracey’s father, L.T., sat at the head of the table drinking instant coffee, black. In his short, blue terrycloth bathrobe, he read the Columbus Dispatch cover to cover. While the rest of the family attended Mass at St. Cecilia’s, he filled plates with fried bacon and toast for breakfast.
At the end of summer, canning day started at 7 a.m. and ended somewhere around dinnertime. The kitchen filled with rows and rows of glistening jars. Large pots of boiling water made the kitchen like a sauna. Dill and vinegar perfumed the house.
Everything they canned came from the garden: tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans.
Tracey’s dad always liked the green beans.
“And ketchup,” she said, made from Grandma’s recipe. Her mother could never get it quite right, though. Grandma never wrote recipes down.
“Oh, a pinch of this, a pinch of that,” Tracey remembered.
At Christmas, the Advent wreath crowned the center of the table. And cooling racks with molasses cookies and Russian tea cakes replaced the summer canning jars.
When there was a special occasion to celebrate, they cooked and invited people over. And every night — in every season — they had dinner together.
Before dinner came a rapidfire grace:
“Bless Us Oh Lord And These Thy Gifts Which We Are About To Receive From Thy Bounty Through Christ Our Lord Amen.” And then a quick Hail Mary.
Tracey could say it so quickly it made her friend Susan — the one whose father was a Baptist preacher — giggle. Tracey kicked her under the table to egg her on.
“I could do it really fast,” she said.
The kitchen table was where they learned how to clean their plates of Crock-Pot pork chops — and how to behave.
“That was the place where you talked about your day,” said Scott Leonard, Tracey’s older brother, who lives in South Carolina. “There was no hiding anything. If you were in trouble, you were in trouble there. ... It was the same as church. The table and church, you’re expected to behave a certain way. ... It was, ‘How was your day?’ But also, ‘Why didn’t you call and tell me where you were last night?’ ”
And heaven help any fly that found its way to their mother’s table.
“She wouldn’t rest until that fly was dead,” Scott said.
By 1986, a full dinner table at the Leonard house was mostly limited to holidays. Sharon, the oldest sister, married and had a family of her own. Scott was out of the Army and had moved home for a while before he got his own apartment. Tommy was out of the Army, too, and working in the payroll department at Macy’s in San Francisco.
The kitchen table was still the place where decisions were discussed and made. Tracey told her parents she was ready to go, too.
They asked her, had she really thought this idea through? The Peace Corps? She said she had. Before she left, her dad gave her a Swiss Army knife. It was his first acknowledgment that she was really going. Midway through her twoyear Peace Corps assignment in Zaire, Tracey traveled to Kinshasa. She needed a doctor to look at the stitches she had gotten after a motorcycle accident she had in the bush.
There, someone handed her a cable that said she would receive upsetting news about her brother, Tom.
She had to bribe a man to get a call through from Kinshasa to Ohio.
“So what’s wrong with Tommy?” Tracey remembered asking.
The connection was bad. Her mother’s voice cracked on the other end of the international call as she shouted his diagnosis into the receiver. “What?” Tracey asked. When she finally understood, she was shocked. She knew she had to go.
Tracey flew back to the States, first to San Francisco to see Tommy. He had been losing weight. He couldn’t keep down food.
She stopped by home in Ohio then returned to finish her work in Zaire. Soon, Tommy moved back home. He was dying.
When Tracey finished her tour, she went home, too.
At the kitchen table, Tommy taught Tracey how to roll sushi. Only California rolls for her — she had given up the family staples and gone vegetarian.
Tommy played mix tapes for her — New Order and the Smiths. Their older brother, Scott, was in the reserves and lived back in town by then. He looked like Don Johnson in his mustache and mirrored Aviator sunglasses.
She and Tommy were both Libras, voracious readers and loved music.
One night Tracey snuck down to the kitchen when everyone else was in bed. The call of a childhood favorite was too much. She opened up a link of Schmidt’s Bahama Mama sausages and slipped it into the microwave.
“And it’s going zzzz, cooking or whatever. And then mybrother comes downstairs. And so we’re talking and ding!”
Tommy opened the microwave.
“You’re sneaking meat!” he teased.
“Don’t tell anybody!” she told him.
Times got harder as Tommy got sicker.
Tracey’s mother sat at the kitchen table and sorted through new research. Newsletters about diets. Experimental treatments that might save him.
They sat there together when they made the decision about hospice.
He had tried a new drug called AZT, but it wasn’t enough.
Tracey and her mom took shifts to care for him through the night. They listened for him on a baby monitor.
Tommy died at home in April 1989.
“For my parents to have their child die like that ... it was terrible,” Tracey said. “But we felt good, I guess, because we did the right thing. There were a lot of times where it was the gay disease and everything. And families didn’t understand their children and kicked them out. And people who had AIDS died homeless. It was a very sad thing. ... Tommy got to come home and be taken care of. ... So I remember it was just kind of like — love, relief.”
Later that day, Tracey and her parents sat at the kitchen table. Her dad sat in her mom’s usual chair, reached around to the counter behind him and grabbed a bottle of his homemade wine. Her mother got three wine glasses.
They toasted to Tommy. After Tommy died, Tracey traveled again. She took a trip to Greece with a friend. She lived in Connecticut near her older sister, Sharon, for a couple of years. She moved back to Ohio for law school and found herself back at the family table studying for the Bar exam.
Tracey was working for the Ohio public defender in 1996 when she met Larry Bell in an AOL news group. He was an Arizona native studying for his Ph.D. in history at Ohio State. He loved a song by Everclear called “Santa Monica” and seemed to identify with the line “lonely and dreaming of the West Coast.” He never liked Ohio’s flat land or cold weather.
Tracey invited him to Thanksgiving dinner that year.
“When I moved to Columbus, Thanksgiving was always the saddest holiday for me because it wasn’t long enough to go home and be with my family,” Larry said. “Then when I met Tracey’s family ... I had a home.”
There was nothing special about the meal itself — turkey, stuffing and all the trimmings. But sitting at the table was the first time Larry felt at home in Columbus.
He would take older brother Scott’s seat when Scott wasn’t there.
He would talk to L.T. about politics.
“We actually talked about 9/11 around that table, too,” Larry said. “I remember I asked L.T. on 9/12, ‘Tell me about when Pearl Harbor was bombed. How does this compare?’ ”
He talked to Jean about the Bible and learned what a real tomato should taste like. He didn’t know how to play euchre, but he learned.
Tracey and Larry got married in 1999 and moved to Arizona in 2003.
Her father died three weeks before they were supposed to leave. Six years later, she lost her mother.
Tracey and her siblings traveled back to Ohio in April 2009 and gathered around the table again to talk about how to divide the family heirlooms.
For Tracey, there was no question. She didn’t care that the table had no real monetary value. That the leaves were held in place by a thick, metal spring her father had added. That remnants of the green and white paint still clung to the underside. That dings and scratches covered the surface.
It’s solid, she knew, with its thick German-looking legs. It held her family together.
Tracey and Larry rented a moving truck and drove three days — almost 2,000 miles — so she could have the table at their home in Phoenix. In fall 2011, Tracey and Larry welcomed a new family member to the table. He was a new- born when they brought him home.
Elijah’s adoption was final a few months later.
In the two years since, the table has become the spot for traditions new and old. The annual Passover Seder is served on Larry’s grandmother’s china, where Tracy’s mother’s Advent wreath once sat.
Tracey’s friend Susan Kindler, who used to giggle during grace, visited last year during spring break and sat at the Passover table.
“I’m surprised Tracey didn’t try to kick me under the table,” Susan said.
As a historian, Larry connects with the table even though it isn’t from his family ancestry. It was part of the German migration to Ohio and a time in American life that doesn’t exist anymore — when generations of families stayed in the same place.
“Isn’t that kind of American, too, that a table would see all these different families using it?” he said.
These days, the table is a place where junk mail is piled, bills are paid and work gets done. It’s where Tracey puts the jars of pickles and beets, the way her mother did on canning day.
It’s a place where Eli is making memories.
“Our son is adopted, so he has his own story that he’s going to explore,” Larry said. “And that’s part of his story. ... Someday he’ll look back and have all the same memories of having Thanksgiving or having a Seder at that table. And maybe it will mean something to him.”
It gives Tracey, now 50, comfort to know Eli has joined the table.
“All of my mom’s family, they’ve all died,” Tracey said. “And I’ve just got cousins there. But it’s not enough to draw me back to Ohio. ... The table is a way of sharing my family with my new family,” she said. “It’s all I have.
“Eli is never going to know my parents, never going to know the other part of my life that was in Ohio and visiting the farm and doing all those things.”
On a recent Saturday night, Tracey and Larry sat at the table with Eli and Grandpa and Grandpa’s friend. The stereo blared Nora Jones as the dogs wagged around the wooden table legs. Jerusalem salad and wine from Argentina rounded out Larry’s steak dinner.
“Wait!” Tracey said as she sat down. “We didn’t say grace.”
She laughed as she began, but slower this time: “Bless us, oh Lord ...” and ended with a Hail Mary.
“Want me to say the Jewish prayer?” Larry asked.
“Baruch atah Adonai … ” he began. And ended with: “Let’s eat!”
Tracey sat near the kitchen the same way her mother used to do. She got up half a dozen times during the meal for more butter, more wine, the same way her mother did.
Eli, barely tall enough to peer over the tabletop, looked up at Tracey and grinned as she offered him a pickle she’d canned, one from her dad’s recipe.
At 2 years old, Eli has already claimed his spot at the table — in his mom’s old seat.