At Her Kitchen Table
It had been a long day of babies, toddlers and elementary children, homework and supper; bath, book, bed, bath, book, bed. My dishpan hands traced the lines etched into the faded wooden table top sitting in my cluttered kitchen as I sipped on my freshly poured cup of milky tea. A flood of memories dinged and scratched the maple that had once belonged to my grandparents.
“Step up here now. Right here.” He motioned to the step stool next to his walker that leaned up against the kitchen cupboard. “Now where’s your apron, the one your Nanny made? Tie it on. If you’re going to cook with me we’ve got to do it right.” He was a giant in her eyes. She reached for the cream coloured apron with the frilly neck ties, made just her size. Caricatures of little boys and girls dancing and playing adorned its front.
“Now wait one minute right there.” He reached for the package of hairnets by the sink.
“But Grampy,” she giggled. “You don’t have any hair!”
“Now don’t be foolish, get your hair net on. We’ve got to do this right; if we’re going to do it.” He pulled the hair net open with slightly uncooperative fingers and slid it over his shiny bald head. “No one wants hair in their bread, now do they?”
She giggled again and reached for her own hairnet, pulling it over wisps of barely curly hair. She dared voice the uncertain. “When will Mommy and the babies come home from the hospital? How long will I live with you, Grampy?”
“Well I don’t know.” He sighed with decades of knowing etching his brow as he looked into her tiny, innocent face. “Could be a while yet, the doctors have to make sure everyone is healthy. Those babies are awful tiny, and your Mom’s been pretty sick. But you’ve got yourself a room of your own here and I can’t say we don’t need your help with your Grandmother’s hand and my knee. For now, anyhow.”
She’d make her rounds, tipping her pretend pill box into her pudgy hand, carefully distributing a piece of affection into the aging hand of her grandfather, then dispensing another morsel into her grandmother’s broken and disfigured hand.
“How will you ever mange?” The minister asked the older couple as he visited. “You, recovering from knee surgery,” gesturing to an elevated knee wrapped, post-surgery, “and then you, with one hand so badly injured. And a two-year-old!”
“Well I expect we will do just fine. With his two hands and my one, and my two legs and his one, we’re more than a whole healthy person. And besides, we have the best little nurse.”
She raised her young eyes through her dark eyelashes and smiled at the grey-haired lady who had always been comfort and love.
But for now…
For now, she rolled and flattened piles of bread alongside him. For now, flour dusted both their cheeks. For now, the warm sun shone through the kitchen window and rested on the twenty-four mounds lining the kitchen table. For now, she nursed them back to health and they nursed her little heart.
For now.
I smile as I lift my tea cup to my lips for a sip of soothing warmth and my mind’s eye recalls his massive frame, his big hands kneading dough. I can nearly smell the scent of fresh bread and hot butter carefully brushed over those steaming loaves, dripping onto the plastic beneath them.
Fat, fidgety fingers peeled back the thick plastic covering that protected the tablecloth covering the newest puzzle. Just a quick peek. A solid border framed unintentional puzzle pieces. A thousand pieces, maybe more, stared up at her. A springtime scene, blue-grey sky, grey-blue snow with tufts of green sprouting, and then a mix of jagged confusion.
Quickly she hid her delight and slid her hands over both the tablecloth and plastic, smoothing them flat. She could hear her Nanny’s day-shoes coming, lightly tapping the bathroom linoleum floor as she collected the supplies from the cupboard and made her way back out to the kitchen.
“There we go. Now come sit here.” The weathered hand tapped the kitchen chair beside her and carefully, slowly brushed through her granddaughter’s wet hair. “Now, how should we go about this?”
“I want to send Mommy out to dinner Nanny; Chinese is her favourite.”
Slowly she wrapped long, dark locks around her crooked, blue veined fingers.
“Chinese you say?”
Strand by strand she wrapped and pinned.
“I’m just not sure how much money I need.”
How much to make her feel special? How much for her to understand it was all worth it: the caring, the loving, the sacrificing that only a tender 10-year-old heart can feel. How much to communicate the depth of this love?
“Well, you know, it’s very expensive to go out to eat these days. I’m not sure you have quite enough, but what if we made her some together? You can do most of it, I will just help a little. We could make fried rice, and meatballs, I’ll even pick up some eggrolls if you like. And maybe a cake. How about a birthday cake?”
Rounded cheeks and half mooned eyes smiled. Surely it would work.
Hours later, perfectly boiled icing and pearled candy decorations framed 10 years of timid uncertainty on that wooden kitchen table.
How long has it been since I’ve had boiled icing? I wonder. Twenty-eight years later those pearled silver candies still take me back to a maturing childhood awareness that motherhood is not always easy. I push the crumbs left behind from pancake supper around with my index finger, tracing memories back into the table.
“Are your jammies on?” Nanny called up the stairs.
The theme song wailed up the carpeted stairs to the small panelled room where she was changing for bed. A pink and grey nightshirt, with the numbers 07 over her right breast, hung well below her knees. She stopped at the top of the staircase before bypassing the painting of the little boy in blue who sat in the rocking chair.
“Are your jammies on? Are you hungry?”
She passed the living room, her grandfather sitting in his chair fully engrossed in nighttime crime show television.
“I thought we’d make Jake and the Fatman pancakes while Grampy watches.”
“How do we do that?” She pulled over a kitchen chair and climbed up to see the butter already sizzling in the fry pan.
“Hmmm, how about a bit of pancake batter here… and a bit more here.” Pools of batter slipped from the fry pan and splattered up the sides. “You see, one larger, one smaller, just barely touching. And how about a chocolate chip here and here for a couple of eyes.” She stepped back and winked, “Now another one, but long and skinny. There we go! Now bring that chair back over here to the table and let’s have us a pancake feast before bed.”
Maple syrup, jam, butter, all the fixings sweetened the giggles and conversation at the table that night. The world was small around that kitchen table; the warm plate leaving an imprint on the plastic cover.
“We should have kept with the plastic cover.” I think to myself as I take another sip of tea and notice the nicks of my own children’s carelessness over the years. The night falls darker while I listen to four little people’s restful sighs gliding down the hall to tickle my ears and fill my Momma heart.
“Alright now, leave your boots in the back porch and take a seat.” Nanny ushered a dozen little frozen feet into the kitchen, some sitting at the table, others on the floor up against the cupboard across from the plastic Santa pinned to the bathroom door.
The sleigh bells chimed as each one entered the back door: a dozen little hands couldn’t help themselves, one by one, just one more shake.
Young, high pitched chatter, laughter and giggles; boisterous attempts at Christmas carols filled the kitchen, bursting out the doors and windows as Nanny heated up the burners, whisked the coco and threw together the ingredients for hot doughboys.
As the butter sizzled and the dough sputtered:
“Did you see him? He was the best Santa ever!”
“The band was my favourite!”
“The dancers were amazing!”
“My feet are sooooo cold!”
Nanny reached for 6 white mugs and sat them down on the table. Tiny purple violets rimmed each one.
How long has it been since the cousins all gathered, each one of us finding our place around this old table? He works at the school, she’s works at the hospital, he has a set of triplets, she’s in Afghanistan now.
“Oh, they ARE beautiful, aren’t they?”
A fistful of lupins, purple, pink and white, landed on the table.
“I had to get Mom to pull over as we drove by, they are so pretty.”
Nanny shook her greying curls. “But your ankle, and you’re on crutches. How did you manage slogging through those ditches? To think you fell your second week home from University!” She reached for the vase high in the kitchen cupboard, ran her crooked finger under the water at the kitchen sink. Carefully arranging the flowers into a colourful display of pinks and purples, proudly placing them on the centre of the table. “There now. I do love lupins.”
“But I don’t love bugs!” Bending low for a closer look, bugs, hundreds of tiny brown bugs, began crawling out from the bouquet. Swooping up the vase she sat it on the back step, screen door slamming its separation from the house.
“They are pretty but they will have to be pretty on the back step!” Tissue in hand she began squishing the fast-moving pests, with a quick twist of her aging thumb, dead on the spot, one after another.
Even as a second-year university student she couldn’t control the urge to sneak a peek at the newest image unfolding hidden beneath the surface of her Grandmother’s tablecloth. Sweeping the dead bugs into her hand she lifted the layers of protection and stole a glance and her Grandfather’s newest project.
“Tell me about school? Have you started teaching in the classroom yet? Are you happier staying in your new place? We are so proud of you.”
I catch a tear slipping down my cheek as I drain the list bit of tea from my floral china cup and set it back down. How is it so much identity can be found in the wood of a table? So much life, so much certainty, so much love, in a solid piece of wood.
How Can I Help?
