The story below is a preview from our September/October 2017 issue. For the full story Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Here in this issue celebrating home and marriage, an inexpensive old table may represent the best of both.
Long, long ago, in the days when men who have long been fathers were little boys running around the backyard with squirt guns (well, they still do that, though now more often chasing children more than each other), Gail and I took a deep breath, went off to Lowe’s or someplace and dug deep into our wallets for maybe $34.95 to get a picnic table to put in that backyard.
We were pleased with this big investment. No, we did not get the big sturdy model with two-by-six planks across the top, but instead the lesser model, with six one-by-four planks forming its surface.
We sprung for stain as well, and after we applied it, we paused now and again to look out the back door at this piece of domesticity added to our household.
Over the ensuing decades the table—surprise, surprise—reacted to the elements in the ways that cheap picnic tables do. Thin boards developed little splits and bigger warps. Nail heads rose out of some boards and into the sunshine. Screws through the support boards loosened. Stain faded and then fully disappeared.
The best thing you could say about the aged table was that it had taken on a rustic look.
Which I liked. Or which I accepted in the context of its milieu—the mostly-bricks patio that I mostly laid down and which carries “rustic” as a primary characteristic.
Gail, on the other hand, had a different view of the old table. “It’s in terrible shape, Kurt. Warped. Coming apart. Split and splintery.”
As the keeper of the backyard—with its bounty of tomatoes, its healthy hostas, black-eyed Susans, its rock walkway gloriously accented with “steppables”—Gail said we needed a new picnic table.
The brief showdown: Cheap old man adverse to change vs. busy person taking time from the thousand other things she does to work on making her backyard as pretty and inviting as it could be.
… for the rest of this story and more from our September/October 2017 issue, Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
