Farmhouse kitchen tables are meant for family gatherings, saying grace, lumberjack breakfasts but not for spittin' watermelon seeds.
Farmhouse kitchen tables are meant for family gatherings, saying grace, lumberjack breakfasts but not for spittin' watermelon seeds.
Let me tell you about my Gramma Dallas’ kitchen table. Gramma Dallas’ kitchen table was a lot like her. It was big. It was round. It was sturdy. It was utilitarian. It was homely. It was beautiful. It got the job done.
My maternal grandparents had twelve children. Six boys and six girls. My mom was in the middle, so I had lots of older cousins and lots of younger cousins. Only one of my grandparents’ children didn’t have children. All the others had a minimum of two up to a brood of a half dozen or more. So, you can see I had lots of cousins.
My younger brother and I spent a good part of most summers from the time we were old enough to help farm, until we were old enough to get part-time jobs, at my grandparents. Although they had moved to a little three-room white frame house, with an enclosed sleeping porch, in the farming village of Garrett, Illinois, Grandpa Dallas still farmed soybeans and corn as a sharecropper. They didn’t own any ground other than the tiny frame house and a couple of lots, used for gardening, in Garrett. The lots provided space for tomatoes, sweet corn, green beans and potatoes. It all needed to be hoed, weeded, and watered, not to mention grass that needed to be mowed.
Their kids were all long grown, married and with kids of their own, so they no longer needed a house with enough bedrooms to sleep a passle of kids. The sleeping porch with just enough space to wedge in a double bed and a dresser provided enough room for the occasional visiting grandchild or grandchildren. Nine of their twelve children lived within a few miles. My parents bounced around from central Illinois to Northern Illinois to Florida with my Dad frequently changing jobs, while my Uncle Wendy, the sole childless child, and a retired Navy sailor worked in the Philadelphia shipyards, and Uncle Bub worked in an auto assembly plant in Flint, Michigan.
Christmas, Easter, and a visit from Uncle Wendy or Uncle Bub would necessitate a family gathering at Grandma and Grandpa’s. The tiny house would be overflowing with aunts, uncles, babies, toddlers, and uniform wearing older cousin’s home on leave from their respective military service. None went to college for more than a semester or two. I was the first to graduate from college.
With no dining room, the kitchen table, of necessity, had to expand to seat as many as could crowd around, all adults, or babies on adult laps. TV trays and laps provided space for others to eat in the living room, or the porch, or the yard.
Mid-morning, the heavy oak table would be firmly grasped by a couple of the men and pulled apart so the extra leaves could be added, leaving just enough room to squeeze in the hoop-backed, mismatched chairs, acquired over the years at farmstead auctions. Like the chairs, I imagine the table was acquired at a farm auction. It’s not likely they paid more than a few dollars for it. They didn’t pay more than a few dollars for much of anything. The weight of the oak pedestal and solid top with its underlying oak trim required the effort of two uncles tugging from opposite sides to separate the sturdy halves.
The table wasn’t fashionable like the mid-century modern chrome tables you’d see at Sears and Roebucks in Champaign or Kelsey’s Furniture in Tuscola. Nope. It was old. Probably fifty or sixty years old then. But it was solid. It served the purpose. With a round-table no one sat at the head. But when Grandpa Dallas called for grace to be said, we all knew who the patriarch was, he didn’t need a seat at the head of the table to define his role. To a child’s ear the prayer was always too long. But somehow the fried chicken stayed hot.
During those summer work weeks, the kitchen with its sloping floor was quiet. The dark oak table would be covered with a plastic table cloth so the hot mugs of tea or spilled bacon grease wouldn’t add scars to its marred surface.
Up before dawn, wiping sleep from our eyes, my brother and I would pull on our jeans and t-shirts, bumping into each other in the narrow crevasse between the bed and dresser before opening the curtain covered exterior glass windowed door to the kitchen.
Mismatched china plates covered with potatoes fried in bacon grease, bacon, oatmeal, homemade biscuits dripping hand-churned butter, smothered either with comb honey or the dark brown of home-made apple butter fuelled our day. All washed down with mugs of Lipton tea.
We wolfed the food down so we could pile into the aged, green International pickup truck to get in the fields by 6 am. Walking the soybean fields with hoe in hand, to attack errant weeds or a cornstalk growing from the last year’s crop, would burn all those calories off by 10 am, requiring meatloaf sandwiches and a slice of apple pie to keep us working til the sun got too hot.
We’d gather back around that round table for a cold milk and bread supper, as it would be too hot for Granma to cook in that Midwestern summer evening heat. We’d desert the table for watermelon on the porch.
The red juice running down skinny twelve-year-old arms, as the black seeds were sent satisfactorily flying through pursed lips into the grass, mandated the watermelon be eaten outside. That big round table was meant for family dinners, saying grace and peeling potatoes, but not for spitting watermelon seeds.
© William L. Enyart, 2020