books, family life

The Kitchen Stack

JOY journal

An odd thing has happened to the kitchen table in our first few months of empty nesting. One end — the place where our firstborn sits when she is home — has become a place for books.

There’s always a volume or two that is devotional in nature — tidily tucked under a beeswax candle that brightens our now-dark dinners. These are books by Oswald Chambers and his spiritual kin. Books best absorbed by consuming a chapter or small section at a time.

In the last couple of weeks, this has expanded to his and her books that rest to the side of the spaces my husband and I occupy at mealtimes. Whatever our book of the moment — books that used to be kept near our bed (me) or a favorite living room chair (him) are now where they are most handy during the declining daylight hours.

We have the space. At least until Thanksgiving, when both daughters will be here and the house will be too lively to sit and read at the table or anywhere else for a while.

Until then, my husband is reading a book about the creator of the first geological map. I just finished what could be considered a scientific beach read, “The Outermost House.”Through it, I’ve spent the last week or so nodding along in agreement with Henry Beston’s century-old descriptions of surf and dune life.

I do not know Cape Cod. But, I am both a Pacific Coast and Great Lakes girl. I know those sounds and sights at the soul level though I have long been land locked.

It is good, this migration of broad thoughts and distant places and peoples into the coziest of our rooms. Winter is coming. I can see it hunched, ready to pounce, just outside our kitchen window. The trees are purple gray. The garden is asleep.

It’s time to ponder.

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After a long career writing for local newspapers — and, on rare occasions, for publications such as The Washington Post — Nora is enjoying a second wind as an innkeeper. She still blogs and does writing projects of special interest. She lives in Appalachia with her husband and a dog named Finn, who is beside himself with joy when the family's daughters have college breaks.

15 thoughts on “The Kitchen Stack”

  5. Empty nest is a most difficult time, one of the hardest. We spend all these years raising our children and just when we feel we really get the hang of it, they up and leave us! As they should, but there aren’t any manuals on that phase of parenting.
    I have three stacks usually going at any given time.

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    1. It is a strange thing to work oneself out of a job. But there’s some fun freedoms that have already surfaced. I’ve found I like eating breakfast standing at the kitchen sink, looking out at the birds. I would have considered that a bad example in the past. 😂

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