Years Around the Table
I walk through Clark Furniture in Wysox, on a mission to find a recliner, but am sidetracked by shiny new dining room tables. Their highly polished surfaces enhance the distinctive and rich wood grains of oak, maple, hickory, and walnut. For a moment, I’m tempted, but instead return to my recliner search and spend the rest of my time there thinking back to our old kitchen table on the Sugar Hill farm when I was a kid
My Grandfather Lewis Potter’s friend, his identity long lost, handcrafted the kitchen table in the 1920s. Made mainly of oak, with a bit of maple too, it stood solid for 40-some years, hosting daily family meals, holiday dinners, birthday cakes, hungry silo-fillers, homework papers, pancake and deer steak suppers, sewing projects, and my father’s pink Motorola radio whenever his beloved Phillies played night games.
In the mid ‘60s, my father purchased a newfangled Formica-topped model and banished the old table to storage in the granary. It shared the granary with mice and squirrel families for several years until Gary and I rescued it in 1978. We sent it out to be stripped and refinished, but despite the refurbishing, it still carries the scars from the past – a couple of black rings from long-ago too-hot pots, dark bloodstains from multiple November deer processing sessions, an unidentifiable red splotch probably from a school art project, and other imperfections accumulated over six generations of living.
Today, after spending years with Gary and me, our kids, and now grandkids in Powell, North Towanda, and Lime Hill, the old table finds itself at home again on the Sugar Hill farm in our new house overlooking the granary. A tablecloth usually covers the evidence of its long hard history of service, but I smile each time I see the battered surface. As it enters its second century, I’m hopeful that someday one of our sons or a grandchild will continue to add new family memories and think of those who gathered round it for the first hundred years.