What is a Dining Table?

When we talk about the hearth of the home (literally the fireplace) we’re talking about a symbol for the home or family itself. The hearth was the engine of the home, that place where the home was kept warm, and where meals were cooked, and where people gathered. But the term can refer to other things besides fireplaces. We might call a mother the hearth of a home, or the kitchen, if people often gather there. The hearth is that thing or place that keeps up the rhythm of the family. And for that reason, it is a thing of great meaning within the family.

With the advent of air conditioning, the fireplace (when present at all) has often become more of a feature or luxury in a home than what the hearth used to mean. In our home, I would call our dining table the hearth. It is where we have dinner each night, where my wife and I share lunch each day, while the kids are at school. Typically, we have whoever’s youngest at the head of the table in a highchair (so that there’s a parent on either side to contain the chaos), but everyday as we’re setting down for lunch, my wife or I will set the highchair aside, and pull a dining chair into its place, so that we can sit on either side of a corner, and be a little closer.

Our dining table is where the children spread out their crayons and papers each night, and where they mash play dough into the grain of the wood. It is where we do homework with our eldest, and the thing our youngest climbs on so he can, if only briefly, be the tallest person in the world. It’s also where we do our taxes, and host our friends. It is the place in our home we make most presentable when people come over, and we keep it up. We oil it when its grain has gone dry. We scrub the scribbles from it and we wash away the flour after we’ve made our pasta dough each Christmas, the way my great-grandmother did.

Our table was the table of my youth. We got it when I was in high school, in Katy, Texas. My parents bought it from a company in Houston that imported lumber from England, that had been in old barns and such, and made furniture from it. So, there’s no telling how old the wood is, or what stories it contains, but I think of it as an ancient thing, come down to us through chance. When my mother died, almost ten years ago now, the table was the only thing I wanted, and we brought it here before we even had a house to put it in. It is a thing of great meaning.

On my darkest days, when I don’t want to do my job anymore, because we all have those days, I try to remember that I am in the business of making things of great meaning. I don’t make the meaning myself; that’s for the families to do. But I do give them a space where that meaning can unfold, and that keeps it all worthwhile.