King Arthur's Got Nothing On Us

The table sat idle, tumbled in a pile of dusty antiques in the attic of an old Marietta brick warehouse. It had a fatal flaw -- bubbled veneer on its face that could not be scrubbed out in any delicate way. My brother-in-law worked in the building and acquired it for me, for free. It was a giant, ungainly, round hunk of wood that required lumberjacks to move. My behemoth folk hauled it to Douglasville and I'm not remembering how in the world they got it into my kitchen. Seems like it involved taking a door off its hinges.

I hand-sanded the fool out of it, not making a dent in the bubbled veneer. I got a glimmer of an idea, to faux paint it to look like a variety of mahogany. This started with a base of pink paint, which would then be striated with varying shades of ebony and brown to achieve said woodgrain. I painted the whole thing pink and then got distracted. For many years, our large family took our meals at a Pepto-Bismol-pink table. I lost the instructions for the recipe for fake mahogany and finally broke down and painted the whole thing fire engine red, since it was the lightning rod of our house anyway. We would sit around it, pulling up extra chairs as needed. You can get about 15 seats around it, if you just keep scooting. Maybe it's the democracy of a round table, where no one person has the preeminent spot, but there is something special about it. It seemed to me, from the many nights of howling laughter that emanated from it, that the table exuded some kind of magic.

It got bumped up, scraped, covered with paint projects, hot pans and construction tools. Then I'd remember that we had company coming, so I'd whip out the paint can and put a fresh coat on it, drying just in time for the first guest (latex paint dries in four hours, you know). This same scenario ensued for years. When we moved to Villa Rica, I told my husband to roll it out behind the house to the driveway, where I put on a dust mask and brought out power tools. I was done with all the hand sanding I had tried. I bought three different grits of sandpaper, put plugs in my ears and dug in. It took most of the afternoon, but I sanded off years and layers of strange paint colors. When I finally got down to the wood and that troublesome veneer, I just kept on going until things got (mostly) horizontal. I painted it classic satin black (oil-based this time) and we rolled it back into our dining room. Many folks who have enjoyed that table at both locations have remarked that it seems like it was made for this old house. It fits perfectly in the room, the Grand Dame of the castle. Very occasionally, I put out my good china and the crystal and it's plumb enchanting.

Now that my children have flown the coop, it often sits, waiting for the next party. Coats, projects, piles of paper and receipts migrate there until I take time to clear it off. There's bits of hot glue sticking here and there and it's starting to look like it needs some love. Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and I might need to pull out the old paint can. By the time everything gets fixed, the family arrives and I actually sit down there, I'm always exhausted but content. I've seen all these trendy, hand-lettered signs that say "Gather." When the goose is cooked and we finally actually do that, there's nothing better in the whole wide world.