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I recently moved to the metro D.C. area to expand my career opportunities and work with people from all over the world. I have a home and a spouse in Pittsburgh. I am married to a massage therapist who moonlights as a professional space organizer. This is every bit as awesome as you might imagine. I live in a lovely, light filled efficiency apartment where the person who knows all my quirks and proclivities has helped me arrange all 500 square feet to meet my needs, and everything I need is only a few steps away. Which is why I was surprised this morning to see that I am still gravitating toward working on my dining room table, instead of at my desk in my home office all of twenty feet away.
I sat down to the
dining room table with my morning cup of coffee and put pen to a remnant of
white packing paper that had been wrapped around some new purchase for the
apartment. My day and week unfurled across one side of the sheet and then over
to the other. People, places, tasks; part idea parking lot, part compilation of
to-do lists. I took a couple of phone calls, scheduled a lunch date, and
noticed that my desk was a repository for papers and a holder of pens, but the
real work was getting done at the dining room table, the space in which so many
endeavors - breakfast, lunch, and dinner - come to fruition to be savored
sometimes alone, but more memorably with friends and family.
I think it is
those memories that season the space of the dining room table. With memories of
friends and family I feel fortified even after hours with my head bowed low and
fingers flying or faltering over the keyboard. The jar of oatmeal bars and the
bowl of fruit within arms' reach don't hurt either. Journeys of the mind are
made solo, whether inward for writing or outward for job hunting, bill paying,
or into the treacherous waters of requesting customer service. I take heart
beginning and ending each journey at the place where memories of my kindred spirits will
find me, in time for dinner.