Peggy’s prompt—by the kitchen table—062111

Peggy’s prompt—by the kitchen table—062111




The first kitchen table I remember was the one at 641 North Sixth Street, in Fort Pierce, Florida, where I lived from the time I was born until I was eight years old. We lived in the bottom half of a rented house at the end of Sixth Street, just down from the hospital and just up from what, in time, became US 1, but we called it Fourth Street.

The kitchen was small, so I think the table must have been, too. I think it was pushed up against the wall on one side, so Daddy sat along one edge, Mama sat along the opposite edge, and my high chair was pulled forward from beside the icebox to the end of the table between them. I remember Mama walked by that table a lot on her way to the stove and sink and cabinets.

And she walked by the kitchen table in our 13th Street house a million times a day, either passing it to get to the sink, the stove, the refrigerator, the back door, or picking up or dropping off something from its surface. The table itself served multiple purposes—the place for our family to sit down and eat (three meals a day), or have a snack (Mama didn’t allow eating in the living room or bedrooms). It was a table for playing cards, for holding the ingredients for a cake being made, a place for shucking corn, or snapping beans, or shelling peas. A place to write letters or address Christmas cards, to fill out college or job application, to wrap Christmas presents, to hold the dried dishes before they were put away in cabinets.

There were three places my Mama could usually be found—working in her yard, in front of her sewing machine in her bedroom, or in the kitchen by the kitchen table.

My Daddy liked to sit down at that table about 8:30 in the evening to have a snack of Ritz crackers with peanut butter—not the kind already made, but the kind you make for yourself with a jar of peanut butter, a knife, and a box of Ritz crackers. This was his “midnight” snack and it pleased him if someone else in the family would join him. Sometimes I did, and I always felt he liked me a lot in those moments.