Around My Mama’s Kitchen Table

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In 1953, as I grew inside my mother’s womb, she lived with her parents in Springfield, Tennessee, while she waited for my daddy to be discharged from the army. Each day she rode a bus back and forth to Nashville to work on an assembly line at Aladdin Industries. There she helped to make transistor radios used by the U.S. military. World War II was over, but the Cold War between the Communist world and the free world was raging.

While working at Aladdin, Mother saved up to buy a bedroom suite and a dinette set. The only piece left from the bedroom suite is the chest of drawers. It is in the RAK (the room above the kitchen) which is getting closer and closer to being presentable.

I salvaged two decorative pieces from the dresser. They are nailed onto the fronts of fireplaces upstairs. These mantles are a very slow work in progress. When we bought our fixer-upper, the upstairs was covered almost completely with what I called “the cheapest paneling you can buy at Lowe’s.” Actually I doubt there was a Lowe’s nearby when it was put up in the 1970s. One of our first “fixes up” was to take off the paneling and see what was underneath. You can imagine our astonishment when we found four fireplaces — nothing spectacular, mind you, just squares of stone with bricks filling the openings. We are told that the mantles were in a sharecropper cabin that burned. Mantles are yet to be a top priority. However, before John got married, he surrounded two of the openings with leftover flooring a friend gave us. Later we nailed on these two precious memories from my childhood.

My favorite memory of that dresser is when Steve and I would put our 45 rpm record with the Bunny Hop on one side and the Mexican Hat Dance on the other on Daddy’s portable stereo and do the Mexican Hat Dance in front of the mirror. You can imagine my delight at the barn dance recently when our hostess announced a special family dance and I got to do the Mexican Hat Dance with our daughter and granddaughter. I texted Steve and got a smiley face in reply.

Only the table is left from the dinette set and, to my sheer delight, I brought it home when we cleaned out Mother’s house recently. Now it sits in our kitchen. It is priceless to me. There I made roads with my ketchup-topped scrambled breakfast eggs. There Mother entertained my friends on my seventh birthday. There Daddy asked God to bless our food at breakfast, lunch, and dinner throughout my childhood.

When I grew up, married, and brought my family to my parents’ house for visits again and again through the years, often the first person we saw when we walked in the back door was Daddy sitting at the kitchen table. How many times did I bump the back of his chair sitting just inside the back door when we came home for a visit?

Mary Evelyn and her family came to our house this past Sunday evening as they do almost every Sunday. Mother and Ray and I eat at the kitchen table, but, for some reason, in the few weeks it has been in our kitchen, I haven’t thought about our eating around it when Mary Evelyn and her family have been here. When I told Mary Evelyn where we were going to eat, she said, “I feel like I ought to be eating Cheerios out of a brown plastic bowl and drinking apple juice,” just as she did so many times when she was growing up.

If you aren’t able to give your children annual vacations to exotic places or quarterly trips to the biggest events in town or weekly trips to eat at their favorite fast food, remember what your children will remember. I am glad that Mary Evelyn remembers eating Cheerios in a brown plastic bowl at the table my Mother worked for while I was in her tummy — and that she told me so.

But the lovingkindness of the Lord is
from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him,
And His righteousness to children’s children,
To those who keep His covenant
And remember His precepts to do them.
Psalm 103:17-18

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