Clearly, I am not a designer. Nearly eight years ago I moved into this house and I have yet to really figure it out. There are three main problems. The first is that this house is more windows and doors than walls. I was told by one of my brothers, the architect, who had never seen the house, that I was wrong about that. I’ve never put it to a measuring tape, mainly because I don’t own one, but I am convinced that inch for inch, there are more windows and doors in this house than there are walls, which, as far as problems go, isn’t so bad. The second and third problems are related. The first is that my living room is rectangular rather than square. It took me a few years to realize this, but I grew up in a house of square rooms, and it made an impression. And that leads to the third and biggest problem: for years I could not figure out where to put a table and chairs, so I ate on the couch and made do with the coffee table. That’s not the end of the world, but I’m 44, and I love to eat, and it was all getting to feel a bit like dorm living. Plus I was starting to think of the couch – which is where I eat, read, write, talk on the phone, pay the bills and watch television – as a gigantic, upholstered wheelchair. I was beginning to picture myself disintegrating into a gigantic blob, sitting there through entire seasons, taking care of business. What if I died, sprawled on that damn thing?
My quest to find a table, like most things, went on far longer than necessary. First, I found a perfect spot for it: beside one of the south-facing windows in the living room. It’s close to the kitchen, it’s in a corner, it’s near a window (most of the space in the house is) and it would offer a clear view out the front, where my uninformed, haphazard approach to gardening has created the horticultural rendition of those beaded tapestries hippies hang in doorways.
So I started looking for a table. I had the dimensions in mind, sort of. I looked at Target and Fred Meyer and trolled the IKEA Web site. I talked about it endlessly: I’m looking for a table. I need a table. I know where I want to put the table, but now I need to find a table. I looked at yard sales and I looked at the Goodwill. For the last year and a half everything I’ve seen has been too tall, or too wide, or too narrow.
Until this weekend, when I finally found one. My attic is impressively uncluttered, mostly because I almost never go up there; I simply forgot the table until yesterday afternoon, when I was walking down Glisan Street on my way to meet a friend for lunch and it suddenly and for no apparent reason popped into my mind. As soon as I got home I unscrewed the legs so I could bring it downstairs. I washed and wiped and polished and then put it back together and discovered that it’s nearly perfectly sized. It’s a bit deeper than what I’d been looking for, but I think that’s a good thing because I can sit at it without bumping. It’s has a bit of a 1950s look to it, with curvy, chrome-finished legs and a faintly patterned top with rounded edges. With the table in place I rearranged the rest of the furniture in the living room, which was surprisingly easy. I ate dinner at the table last night as I listened to the rain. And this morning, I got up before the alarm, discovered that the surface of the table is something of a mirror, reflecting the light and the patterns from the window before which it sits. I started the coffee, opened the curtains, made the bed and then sat down at my table for my morning fix and felt, in a very pleasant way, more settled than I have in a long while.
