On my table, thoughts from months ago seep in through the bent corners; rotating ipads, snacks, meetings, juice, pencils and crayons. They’re like ancestors from some other time you remember well in your body—hands don’t take shape to it any longer, but the body remembers the dance around it, the flow of the room. Ultimately, it remembers the way it made space.
On my table, there are floating plums, peaches, and apples that aren’t entirely a favorite. Juice spills from puffy and chatting mouths and hot skin. Fingers replace napkins, smudges replace clarity, and the bowl is finished before I can reckon with what just happened.
On my table, a hand-me-down fitted sheet becomes a tablecloth. It takes center stage, holding sunflowers, dried floral coastal echinops, and pastel pink and purple gladiolus, a memory within a memory of time.
Flowers move with our bodies. Food goes within our bodies. It is a summer table’s table. The kind that gets to live within an instagram trend. A pair of fabric scissors cut through the seams, peels off the lining and doesn’t bother with a hem.
If I look, I could pay a good buck for what I wanted.
If I look, I can see the unevenness in my hand, the shaky afternoon posing in the corners.
If I look, I can see the oil stains that will build too quickly, and the wax that’ll dry up and layer like a color wheel under the candelabra.
When I look again—because I know I will—I’ll see the time spent in forcing the space to shift with something that cost nothing. The way, with a cloth, it felt like summer in this house and this heat, with these hands and feet, and music, and bodies, and all the shifting and slipping and making things out of nothing.
It is a table cloth of table cloths in this particular summer, after all.
What a great idea to give something new life.
Thank you, Amber!
Exquisite writing 💛
Thank you so much, Em
x
Such a great idea! Would you mind sharing the paint color in your dining room?
Hi Kari,
thank you! I get this question a lot. I went to Farrow and Ball because someone said it’s like a color of theirs… it wasn’t. It’s a knock off mix from Benjamin Moore. I am still doing research myself, because it was custom colored i believe. Will report back as soon as i make headway. 😉
Thank you! It’s such a beautiful color!