OUR LONG BROWN TABLE

t’s funny how the long brown table in our dining hall can switch roles so fast. During the day her job is to  hold the daily mail and unfinished homework, as well as plates of cookies, a pit stop for hungry bellies  in the house. But at night she is a beauty, a piece art adorned in the finest linens, prettied up with  rouge placemats and matching napkins. The long brown table has become a Sunday evening family  ritual and somehow in an almost magical way she quiets the differences between us so we can enjoy  a meal together. 

My father is seated in his oak carven throne at the head of the table, in the day you would find him to  be a rather serious man but tonight he’s a story teller, a man of incredible mystery and cheer. With  every slice of pie served up a cheesy joke comes as a side. To my right mother sighs, almost in  perfect balance of his jovial spirit she brings forth a salad with a newsletter of the stories of the  comings and goings of the neighborhood. Updates of birthdays, invites, funerals and the banter below  the grapevine are all shared with tiny edamame dumplings across the long brown table. 

On the other end sit the tattlers, their lips dolled in the brightest shades of lipstick, they eat dinner  like it’s poisoned, each forkful tinier than the last in hopes of sustaining the trending diet of the  season. Every now and then you’d hear the occasional “you didn’t even tell me she was engaged”  from that end followed by their judgy eyes hovering up and down the long brown table 

I sit with dad, mum and my little sister. She eats her food like he has a bag of mixed colored candy.  Picking off all of her favorite things first and then when half satisfied pulls a face at the rest of the  meal. When she does eat though, she inhales the food in front of her, licks her fleshy lips and grabs a  plate of hor’s d’oeuvres complacent of the fact that her sleeve, drenched in a mixture of oils and  crumbs smeared against the long brown table.  

It’s not a perfect family but it’s my family, soon I will head off to college and my sisters at the other  end will be married and we may not get to sit at our long table any more, and so we do what we can,  each Sunday by Sunday we continue to share bits of our life around our long brown table.