The Always-Theres

Did a table ever make you cry?

“Gift: table and chairs. Seats six easily and has a leaf to add space for at least eight. Passed down to us several years ago, it’s been through a lot, and it kind of shows. But it’s the perfect spot for little hands to create masterpieces without worrrying about messing it up, and a lot of happy memories have been made around it.” 

I finished typing the words, annoyed at the tears blurring my vision as I clicked “Post” to the local giving circle page. It’s a table, for Pete’s sake! I told myself. Let it go. 

Matt and I had lived in nineteen different homes in our twenty-five years of marriage¹, and that wasn’t even counting a handful of times when we lived in temporary lodging for a month or more while finding a place to live. We slipped in and out of houses and apartment buildings like we were trying on clothes. Some we loved and hated to leave, while others disappeared behind us without a second glance in the rearview mirror. Instead, the tendrils of our affections usually wrapped around things other than our abodes, the things I call the Always-Theres. 

For nine years, we had The Bye-Bye, a taupe Saturn sedan, the first car Matt and I ever bought new. We drove it off the dealership lot with baby Jayna strapped into her carseat. My dad packed it to the brim with our belongings and drove from California to New Orleans, where he picked up Jayna and me at the airport and squeezed us in with lampshades and suitcases on our laps. Then we drove the remaining three hours to our new life in Pensacola. Matt was finishing Officers’ Candidate School, and we were a Navy family now. 

From there, The Bye-Bye made a couple cross-country roadtrips with us as we spent a year in Corpus Christi, Texas, then Jacksonville, Florida. We shipped it over the Atlantic when we moved to Spain, where newborn Skyler rode home from the hospital in it. It got its name from her running around the house every time we were about to go somewhere, shouting, “Bye-Bye! Go to Bye-Bye!” After traversing most of the Iberian Peninsula for three years, we took it back to California. Finally, in Virginia, after nine solid years of service, we decided it was time to replace The Bye-Bye. Jayna and Skyler waved goodbye as it drove away for the last time, giant tears sliding down their cheeks.

By then, though, we’d had Kit, my first minivan/ mommobile, for a few years already. Kit outdid The Bye-Bye in every way, and not just because she had automatic doors and windows, a 6-CD changer, (The Bye-Bye had just one), and could seat up to eight passengers. She, too, made several journeys across the country–east to west, north to south, then back again–and crossed the Pacific: first to Hawaii and then Korea. Three newborns rode safely with her. Like an eternally patient friend, she endured vomit, blood, and worse. Truckloads of sand trekked in from the beaches around our various homes were embedded in the fabric of her seats. One child will remain unnamed here, but that name was scratched forever into her paint, along with a few unfortunate scrapes from the pillars in the basement garage of our apartment building in Busan. 

In 2020, the year Matt retired from the Navy and the first time we left Korea, we decided it was time to let Kit retire too. The kids and I had already returned to the States when Matt texted to tell me about the little family that bought her, and how happy they were. He forwarded me the group selfie they had sent him, their broad smiles assuring me she was in good hands. I walked into the backyard of my sister’s house, where we were staying, and told the kids, passing the phone around so they could see the picture too.

“Look how happy they are!” I told the kids, scrounging for the enthusiasm I knew I needed in order to convince them my words were true. But I couldn’t look up, and I knew they heard the way my voice caught around the lump in my throat. “They’re going to love her too!” There was silence, then sniffling, and as I raised my eyes to meet my children’s, I saw their tears too. 

For almost fifteen years, Kit was a constant in their lives.

The glances over my shoulder at my passengers a million times, and the views I had seen over the years now pieced together and played in my mind like a grainy old home movie. There were the original two passengers, little blondes with gappy smiles wearing macaroni necklaces. Then I saw the roadtrip games we played on our long drives across America. The tantrums in Target parking lots. The drives home from hospitals with precious newborns strapped in. The rides to dance recitals with costumes draped carefully in the trunk. The nervous pauses outside new schools or churches, scraping up just enough courage to go inside. The two blondes wearing caps and gowns, headed to their graduations three years apart. We had loud singalongs and laughter till we cried, passionate arguments and heartbroken tears. Whatever she lacked in sexy elegance, Kit made up for a thousand times in dependability. And with the myriad changes and goodbyes my kids endured, that meant everything.

There were other, smaller Always-Theres –toys beloved by all the kids, for instance, or books with sticky fingerprints and crayon scribbles added to the pages we read ten thousand times before they irreparably fell apart. One dress, and only one, survived all four of my daughters in surprisingly pristine condition, and that has been tucked into a Rubbermaid box with prayers for (someday) a granddaughter. 

And then there was the table.

Our first table was handed down from my grandparents, tiny and ancient with drop leaves. In Spain, we replaced it with another table made from pine that seemed plenty large when not even four of us sat around it. But by the time Annalee turned one, seven years ago, it was clear we needed something bigger. We were about to move to Korea, though, and when I surveyed the available options, there wasn’t a single one I loved quite enough to purchase. Besides, it seemed risky to sink money into something we were about to box up and send across the ocean. One day at the playground, I discussed my conundrum to my good friend Aimee.

“Oh!  Take ours!!” she exclaimed. “I mean it!! We just got a new one, and I was about to post the old one on Craigslist for free. It’s not perfect. But you can have it! Please!!!” A few of the chairs were falling apart, but the table itself was solid wood, country style, the kind that looked like it could withstand a large, wild family like mine. So I thanked my friend profusely and accepted her gift, then ordered blue cafe chairs to go with it for a funky, cottage vibe. The chairs arrived just before our household goods were packed for Korea, so we didn’t have the chance to sit together at it until we got to Busan. 

Once we found (against many odds) an apartment that would fit all of us and our budget, I worried that the table would be too big for the dining area. But to my surprise it fit just right, tucked under a glitzy chandelier. Its lightly scarred surface just seemed to work, somehow, with the sparkles above it, showing us that maybe we could fit in too in this new and wildly different place, however unlikely it seemed. When the days seemed lonely, we loved to remember our good friends who had given us the table. “Sometimes,” Lilly once told me, “I just pretend Ruby and Mary are eating with us.” 

As with Kit, there were plenty of arguments and tears and laughter and stories as we sat at it. We managed to squeeze several extra seats around it at Thanksgiving and sang “Happy Birthday” dozens of times and bowed our heads in daily gratitude.

I always planned to refinish it, but it was a project I never got around to, due to a lack of motivation. Somehow that table was like a favorite pair of jeans that fits just right and only looks better the more you wear them. My kids drew pictures and painted, dyed Easter eggs and decorated Christmas cookies, all while seated at it, and not once did I worry about them messing up the table.

Any speckles of paint just added to the charm, at least in my eyes. 

But when we returned to Korea in 2021 and there were only five of us, it felt too big. For the first time since we got it, we removed the leaf because it seemed to make the absence of our two oldest all that more noticeable, especially since we couldn’t have guests over due to pandemic restrictions. “Maybe it’s time to get a new one,” Matt and Lilly kept telling me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to agree. 

Finally, though, the decision was made for us. While temporary furniture is usually provided during moves like our recent one to Germany, for tiresome reasons having to do with tedious details of our lease, we weren’t given anything this time. We decided to keep the table to use until we left, then pass it on to another family. 

The post didn’t get any response for several minutes, and that seemed like a long time. I’d given away plenty of other items, and they were always spoken for almost instantly. I wondered if no one would want it. What then? It was a good table, wasn’t it? Or was I the only one who thought so?

Suddenly, my phone buzzed as a message came in.

“I’d love the table,” the woman said. As I started to type a response she added, “We have four kids and I’m pregnant with a fifth. Our current table is already so small, my husband and I always end up eating on the couch.” 

Even if fifty other people had asked for the table, even if someone had said, “I’ll pay good money for this!”, my heart told me that here was the woman to give it to. Aimee had five kids, and I had five, and now it would go to another family with five. It seemed so fitting. We arranged a time for her to pick it up, and I suggested she have someone to help her carry it into her home.

“It’s solid wood,” I told her, “so it’s pretty heavy.” 

“I love solid wood tables,” she replied. “They can take anything and somehow just look better for it.”  

Yes, she was the one.

Of course I know the idea of the The Always-Theres actually always being there is a myth. “Rust and moth destroy;”²accidents, fires, and storms can whisk everything away in a heartbeat. More often, though, the kaleidoscope of our lives turns just a little bit but changes the view, the story, entirely. Then we needed this… now we need that. The true Always-Theres are the memories we carry gratefully, even when the picture looks different. Nevertheless, sometimes the goodbyes still sting.  

Matt came home from work that day and saw the empty space where the table had been.

“It’s gone?” he asked, and I nodded in reply. He didn’t seem at all surprised when the tears returned as I told him, “It went to just the right family though,” but drew me in for a long, slow hug. 

Let’s talk! What are your Always-Theres? Have you ever cried saying goodbye to a place or an object? Share some of your thoughts below!

1. We are living in our twentieth home now, since our recent move.

2. Taken from Matthew 6:19-21 ESV