Our tables!

The dining room — with the long, slender table standing on lion’s feet, or that oval one with the extra leaf for the grand feasts when the whole family gathers. The place where we spread the good tablecloth.

Cooking from the night before and before dawn breaks, the whole house perfumed — slow-cooked tomato stew with thick pasta, or lamb roasting in the oven; and the salads, lettuce finely chopped with dill and fresh spring onion; and the cheeses, the little dishes, everything laid out on the good china.

Sunday at noon, when the children come, or on Dad’s name day — the relatives, the cousins — the little ones at the small side table; heat spilling out of the kitchen; “let me help, what should I bring?” “Oh come sit down, Maria, let’s begin.”

We begin under the best of omens, and halfway through someone mentions politics, or the ancestors, or inheritance, or something — something that should not have been said — and boom, the table catches fire, voices rise, “come on, don’t be like that,” “cheers,” and then the quiet settles in.

Yet there are times when the table holds a true celebration — filled with love, friendship, emotion for the reunion. Usually with fewer relatives, fewer burdens, fewer unspoken things.

The table is, after all, the place where humanity gathers. It is the ground of meeting — where people love one another, care for each other, share food, write and erase, rest their heads above a glass, speak, laugh, weep. It is the landscape of our closeness.

Whether it is wooden, glass, square or round, it is the table that carries our memories like a boat in the Aegean Sea.

P.S Our tables, then — those square ones, the long narrow ones, the oval ones, the ones with extensions that make room for everyone and everything. The ones standing on lion’s legs, or on the carved wooden boule that holds four sculpted feet; the glass tables with the long iron legs… all those tables that, whatever form they take, carry the weight of our lives. They endure our gatherings, our joys, our Sunday cooking, our New Year’s feasts with our best dishes. They endure our arguments — the small ones, and the Homeric ones too — that end in tears but also in relief, because what haunted our insides was finally spoken. These are the tables that celebrate with us in every “cheers, my friends,” that watch candles blown out and hear the wishes for “many more.” They shine with happiness beside us on holidays, delight in the fine tablecloths, the hidden china, the gleaming cutlery. These tables that are inherited and continue their lives in new homes; the ones that, in those new homes, transform into desks on weekdays, welcoming children spreading out their modeling clay and markers, supporting computers and the little basket for the keys — these multitasking tables have a place in the life and history of humanity.