The old cherry table

I am sitting at the kitchen table in the cabin. It is round, with a system for pulling apart the two hemispheres and inserting leaves. The leaves, nicked, stained and discolored, are in the closet. The table has been here for a long time, as it got dislodged from its place of dignity and importance in the Tall House dining room. One damask tablecloth or another always covered it. Chairs that more or less matched it got covered in damask too. It showed its quirks even then, the skirt that caught nylons and ran them, and the long sweeping legs, gnawed and scratched at the base from some long dead pet, of ours as children, or my Dad’s and uncles from their childhood, or my Grandma’s, from hers.

The chairs were Sunday school chairs, I think, from a country church that folded 60 or 70 years ago, when farm families cut their losses and moved to paying jobs and suburban living, or just, perhaps, to 2 or 3 children instead of the 9 or 10 that would have supplied a lively Sunday school. I picked the chairs up at Stockton Sales, a locally famous emporium where the contents of attics and barns had their last shot at utility. People still remember when you could get a good axe or frying pan there, or even a set of china or bedroom set. We got a sofa, believe it or not, maybe from the 1830’s or’40s, or I suppose it could have been a little later. We rebuilt it and recovered it. Ah, those were the days of Stockton Sales, before the owners got a subscription to the Antique News and could look up ‘values.’ The good old days when things were priced to sell and trucks came down from Maine empty, and filled up at Stockton Sales, and went back north to fill the tourists’ barn sales.

This table got its leaves taken out, finally, here in the cabin kitchen, where we might drink coffee together, or fix vegetables together, or one person might sit while another works and talks, or I might sit by myself and write, or read the paper, and the skirt of the table, affixed to both hemispheres, meets and provides no danger to nylons. No nylons at the table now. No damask tablecloth either, of course, to wash and mend and iron.

This table is, I think, solid cherry. There may still be trees standing, the age of the cherry that got felled to make this table. Sometimes the price of cherry is high, and sometimes it is the walnut. It is not ever, I believe, high for tulip poplar. Hemlock always gets a market. Walking in the woods with a forester is dollars and cents. The succession plans of the forest differ from those of the forester. Pull out the weed trees, the aspen of course, and the beech. Cut the trees that take up space but have no straight trunk. Plan the logging off. A neighbor who does not log off threw his arms around a cherry yesterday. We looked up up up into its canopy. «Well you could get $150 for this tree,» he said, «and then you could go out to dinner, and you wouldn’t have the money any more, and you wouldn’t have the tree any more and you would have a great rut where the machinery pulled the tree out of the woods.» «We can’t go back and plant this tree 150 years ago,» says Merv.

If I go back, sitting at this cherry table, 150 years ago, I am in a house by the Silver Creek. The table is new and the dining room isn’t very old either. And Silver Creek is booming. There is money there, from the new companies that make processing equipment for the grain silos powering the Great Lakes cities. There are fancy houses being built, and solid ones too, on Main Street and Central Avenue. Barns for teams of horses, farms for the village’s milk, and the railroad, Chicago, Cleveland, Erie, Dunkirk, Silver Creek, Buffalo, Albany, New York. Ah, sophistication. Ah, great barrels of china, shipped from Limoges, to New York, to Silver Creek, to be painted and placed in china cabinets and on tables. Fanciful serving pieces for molded salads and tea sandwiches. Long platters for hunks of meat or fowl. Cups for coffee, with their pattern on the outside. Cups for tea with their pattern on the inside. And a Sunday School building down the street and around the corner, built new to attach to the old simple New England church on the green.

The Silver Creek flooded, why should it not, with the forests all cut down to make dining room tables, and new houses. The hills were bare, plowed, planted, not so very prosperous, not really able to compete with Ohio, or other points west, and their rich soils and longer growing seasons. The creek flooded, and the house. And a fire and a rebuilding, and finally, the last one there, my Grandmother, died and the house was sold. The table got moved and moved again.

To have my cake and eat it too. To have this old cherry table here, and the old cherry trees there. The forest is growing up and we aren’t going to log it off. Sometimes things just work out.