everything from Now & Then collab by Etc By Danyale & Little Butterfly Wings
Journaling (570 words):
(story told from the point of view of the table)
I was adopted in August 1999 by a young, childless couple who lived in an apartment in Glendale, CA. Robert and Michele put a lot of thought into choosing me. He was more opinionated. He liked my Mission style and solidness. He didn’t like the way many other tables have fancy legs and such. They were ready to get a new table because they had been using an old, smaller table his parents had given him. The most exciting part for Michele was planning dinner parties for friends. In the first photo, I’m holding dishes her mom collected for her and a bean salad she tucked into corn husks. She had fun looking up new recipes and cooking.
Somewhat suddenly, when I’d only resided in the apartment for 10 months, I found myself being disassembled and loaded onto a huge orange truck with a lot of other furniture and boxes. I didn’t see Robert and Michele for several days and felt the truck zooming speedily for long stretches. Next thing I knew, men were carrying me into a nice, big house way across the country, in Fredericksburg, VA. Just like in CA, I was placed in a room adjacent to a kitchen, but unlike in CA, there was nothing else in the room! The walls were pure white, lacy curtains at the tall narrow windows. Soon I realized my new room was called the “dining room” and was just inside the front door and to the left. Across the hall was the “library,” lined with full bookcases and a piano.
Life was very quiet for a while. After about 10 months, I began to hear crying and babbling, and realized they had brought a baby into the house. Eventually she sat in her own plastic blanket-lined seat beside me sometimes while the family would eat. Then another baby appeared, and then a third! Things got a little crazy. When the babies were able to move around independently, they liked to climb all over me. They could be noisy and sometimes they tied yarn on me attached to other pieces of furniture and crawled through the web. Then they started writing on papers and doing crafts and playing games on me. In 2011, big changes began! At first I thought I’d be moving houses again, but I was just dismantled -- which tickles and is worrisome -- and moved down the hall and into a bigger room. This room was white too, and quite bare. But not for long . . .
I’m not sure how they did it, because they covered me up with some kind of fabric, but they turned all the walls a nice warm yellow. They added new curtains, a new big comfy chair everyone coveted, and a new credenza and hutch, which they filled with games. Now, 8 years later, I’ve watched the little ones become adult-sized (or almost, in the case of the youngest). I’ve witnessed hundreds of games, all kinds of projects, a few meals, conversations of all kinds, meetings with a variety of people, some who return repeatedly over the years and others who only come for a short time, the warm afternoon sunshine, happy and sad times, Thanksgiving feasts and Christmas presents. My surface is dented, scratched, and worn, and one of my legs keeps coming loose and having to be kicked back into place, but I feel loved and very useful.
