I should tell you about that table. It’s the reason for everything else.
My husband, Don, and I bought it in March of 1981, at a farm sale south of Juniata.
We’d been married two years. We were eating off a card table his mother had loaned us. I mention that because I’ll come back to card tables.
The auctioneer started it at two hundred dollars and got nothing.
It was a long oak extension table that somebody, sometime in the fifties, had painted kitchen green. Legs and all. It came with eight pressed-back chairs, painted to match. Two of them had split seats.
It got all the way down to fifty before anybody raised a hand.
Don went to eighty-five. The other fellow shook his head.
We had a hundred and ten dollars in the checking account that morning. I remember because I did the subtraction in my head the whole way home, with the table upside down in the back of his father’s pickup and the chairs tied on top of it with baler twine.
He stripped that green paint in the garage all spring, with the door up, after his route.
Don drove a propane truck for the co-op for thirty-one years. He smelled faintly of it every day of his life. I never minded.
Under the green paint was quarter-sawn oak, with a grain like tiger stripes. I stood in the garage door the night he got the top clean, and neither one of us said anything for a long while.
With both leaves in, that table runs just shy of ten feet. It seats twelve if nobody minds an elbow.
For twenty years we only had the eight chairs. Then ten. I hunted the rest at sales and secondhand stores, matching the pattern pressed into the top rail.
I found the twelfth chair at a consignment shop in Minden in 2003. Twelve dollars.
Don said it was the only time he ever saw me cry over furniture.
Every Thanksgiving of Stephanie’s whole life was eaten at that table. The dinner after her first wedding. And the long, quiet Sunday dinners after that marriage came apart, when it was just her and me and Don and a six-year-old boy who wouldn’t eat his peas.
Don died four years ago this past April. His heart. In his sleep. The doctor said it was a mercy, and I suppose it was.
After that, it was a ten-foot table with one woman at it.
I’ll be honest. I quit sitting there. I ate my supper at the kitchen counter with the television on. The table turned into a place to sort the mail.
Then last June, Stephanie married Curt Lindquist.
Curt sells seed for a company out of Grand Island. He is, I’ll say right now, a decent man.
They bought one of the newer houses up on the north end of Hastings. It was the first house Stephanie had ever owned, after nine years in a rented duplex. It had a dining room with a chandelier in it and not one single stick of furniture.
She stood in that empty room the day they got the keys. I could see her trying to work out what a table would cost.
So I said it.
“Take mine. Take it till you find one of your own. It’s a loan.”
I said the word loan. She agrees now that I did.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.