Happy Tuesday,
This Thanksgiving, I realized I had the longest table I’ve ever owned as an adult.
We added the extra leaf. We dragged out a folding table and tacked it onto the end. We stole chairs from every room in the house. At one point, I just stopped and looked—really looked—down the full length of it.
My son was all the way at the far end, laughing at something I couldn’t hear, his plate half-finished, his world still so wide open in front of him.
And then something strange happened.
As I looked past him, it didn’t feel like the table ended where the wood stopped. For just a second, it was like the table kept going—beyond my dining room, beyond this year, beyond this house. It stretched backward. I wasn’t just looking at a holiday table. I was looking into the past.
I could feel it more than I could see it: other tables, other rooms, other holidays. All of them are somehow connected to this one long line of chairs and plates and people I’ve loved.
The first table that appeared in that vision wasn’t mine at all. It was my parents’ table.
In my memory, it’s always a little smaller than it probably was, because I remember it from kid-height. The grown-ups seemed to tower over it. The “good plates” came out of the cabinet only on certain days. My mom moved around that table like it was a stage she knew by heart—refilling, checking in, nudging people to eat just a little more.
There was a kids’ table back then, usually a card table off to the side with slightly wobbly legs. Plastic cups. Paper napkins. The “less important” table—or at least that’s how it felt when you were seven and desperate to sit with the adults. What I didn’t understand at the time was that both tables were part of the same story. Same food. Same laughter. Same family drama. Same love. Just different vantage points.
At my parents’ table, I learned what holidays looked like. I learned who carved the turkey and who said grace. I learned which stories got told every year and which ones we carefully avoided. I watched chairs quietly change over time—an uncle who stopped coming, a grandparent who never missed a holiday until suddenly they did.
Back then, I thought of those changes as interruptions. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned they’re just the way the table works. It’s never fixed. It’s always in motion.
What I didn’t know then, sitting with my feet barely touching the floor, was that one day I’d be standing at the head of my own too-long table, hearing my own son laugh from the far end, and seeing my parents’ table stretching out behind him like a shadow.
Their table didn’t disappear. It became part of mine.
And that’s when this idea really settled in for me: our table is never just about this year. It’s all the years stacked on top of each other. Faces who are gone but still present in the stories we tell. New faces who don’t yet realize they’re becoming part of the family timeline. The table grows. It shrinks. It shifts. But if we’re paying attention, we see it for what it really is:
A never-ending table.
So, as we move through this season, you might find yourself doing the same thing—pausing for a second, looking down whatever “table” you have in front of you, and realizing it’s longer than it looks. The people who shaped you, the people you’re shaping now, and the people who will come after you—they’re all somehow seated there.
That realization comes with a quiet responsibility: to be intentional about who you invite, who you appreciate while they’re in their chair, and who you honor when their chair is empty.
Because the table keeps going, whether we see it or not.
Onwards,
DDD