When we moved into our Kansas City house, we planned everything around dinners with family. We filled the huge dining room with a massive table and surrounded it with 10 chairs. To celebrate our marriage, we picked table settings for 12. We combined all of our cooking and serving ware into the cabinets and loaded the hall closet with board games for every possible occasion.
The occasions just never really came.
Our families are sprinkled around the city and our location wasn’t the most convenient. The area we lived in made some uneasy. Friends were busy. Life was nuts. Gathering everyone could be a lot to ask – and so, it just never really happened naturally.
At the farm, that has changed entirely. All of the things we gathered – the table, the plates, the games – they’re all in storage. Friends and family continue to pop in for rides around the property. For walks through the garden. To plant new herbs and vegetables. We grill hotdogs. We eat off of paper plates.
It’s everything we’d hoped would happen for a very, very long time.
My brother and I recently joked that when they visit there’s no place to sit. We make dinner and move our plastic folding table to a random area of the house. Sometimes it’s the breakfast nook. Sometimes it’s the future living room. We’ve never actually used the future dining room.
Most recently, we sat on the deck. We rummaged through the garage for lawn chairs and a few of our old wood dining chairs. No one really cares about the mismatched mess of “furniture.” Or the lack of a real table. We fill our paper plates with good food and shared a filling meal with great company.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, the farm continues to provide us with abundance in so many ways. Especially during this very weird time in society, I’m extremely aware of just how fortunate we really are.