I’m told this table and the wood-backed chairs belonged to my maternal grandmother. It expands to comfortably accommodate ten, twelve if necessary. I wonder why my Grandma Ruth Arnold had or wanted a table that big when it was just her, my grandfather, Albert, and my mother, Althea – an unexpected child who arrived a few months after my grandmother turned thirty-nine in 1920.

My grandmother gave my mother this table at some point. I don’t have a memory of it arriving from Eau Claire, WI to my childhood home in Massachusetts. But, in my memory, it was always there – at every dinner and special meal. It spent a lot of years expanded to accommodate all of us – me, my one brother and four sisters, my father, my mother, and every Christmas for three weeks and then for the final three years or so of her life, my grandmother as well.

In the late 1990s my mother shipped this table, the chairs and a buffet to me in Oklahoma where my husband and I raised our two children and lived for over twenty-two years. It returned to Massachusetts with us in 2016.

This is the table at which I composed my first stories.

My family gathered around this table for a meat, potato and vegetable dinner every week night and most weekend nights. As the youngest of six, I needed to be creative about cutting through the voices sounding all around me. I would jump in at any opening and tell something, anything just to be heard. What I said didn’t have to be true; it just had to be engaging.

That remains my goal, whether at this great old table, or at my writing desk, whether for work or creative writing: Be clear and engaging. I have written for every job – except scooping ice cream for Baskin-Robbins and making mayonnaise for a D.C. deli. Feature articles, web content, interview write-ups and promotional materials, newsletters, grant proposals and position papers.

Some of these written efforts brought money to non-profits, membership to organizations, assisted admissions to colleges. Some garnered recognition: Parent Publication of America awards for articles on the wilderness, the No Child Left Behind policy, and traveling with children on The Mother Road (Route 66); and a YANKEE Magazine prize for an essay about one dawn on a New Hampshire pond.

I am currently at work on a collection of short stories, a series of essays and a novel. When not writing or reading, I can be found wandering the Great Marsh or beaches and forests nearby, walking my two dogs, cooking, gazing at birds and clouds, listening to music of all kinds, and, between March and October, obsessing over the Boston Red Sox. To this day, nothing beats sitting around that table, eating a meal and swapping stories.

 

Author Photo by  Rachel Coward