Life Around the Table

Some ramblings this morning on food and life around the table...I slice the potatoes and onions thin. Grind on fresh pepper. Add olive oil. Stir the ingredients together slowly.

Stove-top fried potatoes. Comfort food.

I have not quite figured out how family dinners work now that the kids are in college. Work, school and eating schedules rarely coincide.

I miss the noise and bustle of a full table.

Of talk and sharing. Chaos sometimes.

Usually it is the two of us now, my husband and I sharing life around the table. The duet seems quiet after years of a full ensemble. Mingled with the slower cadence, is an adjustment, a sadness, after the losing of an older generation that will no longer sit down beside us.

Today I scanned several years of photos for my siblings from my Mom's albums, the years when the four of us kids were small. Like many of that generation, before Instagram and digital pics, photos were reserved for special occasions--birthdays, vacations and holidays.

The daily life was rarely photographed, yet those memories are forever etched in my brain. To me, family time equals time around a table - whether meat and potatoes in a farm kitchen or pineapple fried rice at a Thai restaurant. Food equals love to me.

So although, we eat out more often now, there is still something that draws me back to slicing potatoes and onions over the kitchen sink. And stirring in a few chunks of ham. So much of my time is spent at a computer screen that my hands long to do something else - to dice and chop and make something simple and flavorful from basic ingredients.

When we were in Peru last summer, our life pace slowed. Each morning while at a hostel, we sat and ate in the family kitchen, warmed from the heat  of a wood burning stove. Tea water tasted smoky and earthy. We broke off chunks of fresh rolls and smeared them with butter and spoonfuls of jam.

Typical Breakfast at the Hostel

We chatted with international travelers in our assorted languages and I determined RIGHT THEN, that when I got home I would quit grabbing a yogurt and a bagel and stop working through meals while I typed on the computer. I would share my table with people and food and take time to BREATHE.

But when I got home, Mom's health took a dive and life spiraled into insanity.

Yet, now, I find myself back with that thought. That vow.

Last spring I read a book by Shauna Niequist,

Bread and Wine,

that cemented some of this for me.

I liked this thought on the pages, "Food matters because it's one of the things that forces us to live in this world--this tactile, physical, messy and beautiful world--no matter how hard we try to escape into our minds and our ideas. Food is a reminder of our humanity, our fragility, our createdness."

Shauna also quoted C.S. Lewis, "God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not; He invented eating."What are some of your thoughts of food and life around your table? I find that when family life changes, the table is one of the first places you feel that change.