Writing Contest - First Place, Giffen Mare Maupin

When I imagine a table where everyone feels welcome, I hear in my mind the final lines of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Paul Robeson”:

…we are each other’s

harvest:

we are each other’s

business:

we are each other’s

magnitude and bond.

Brooks’s lines are both quiet and insistent, a gentle assertion and an invitation to practice reciprocity and tenderness. She reminds me that welcome is both noun and verb: to co-create a table where everyone feels welcome, where we attend to one another as if “we are each other’s / harvest,” is the work of a lifetime. When we build tables where we all feel welcome, we become involved in numerous kinds of care—for the eggs we whisk and the parsley we scatter, yes, but also for the full human beings who sit beside us.

I dream of perpetual gatherings, held around tables small enough for glasses to clink, for hands to touch, for voices to be heard by those for whom hearing is challenging. I imagine these tables standing in open, bright air—in fields and orchards, beside gardens and forests, on beaches, near lakes. With the earth close to us, we are asked to recognize the connections between the meals in our bowls—fish, grapes, olives, and more—and their original sources, on land and in water.

The meals at these tables unfold in response to a common invitation. We each bring a dish that creates in us a sense of comfort, a feeling of home. Because all of our bodies respond differently to different foods, we include lists of ingredients with our contributions. We laugh at the delightfully random assortments that emerge on the platters in front of us. My friend T. shares the canned peaches that her grandmother fed her when she was sick. A. passes marinara blended from the jars of tomatoes and basil that remained after her Nonna’s death. J. hands me one of the egg custards she devoured as a child. We listen, mesmerized, to the stories of women who harvest koseret and besobela for Bonga spice. They describe the smell of the soil where these herbs grow, how the plants feel in their hands. These meals have a life beyond our final bites: together, we compile cookbooks that include both our recipes and our connections to the dishes we bring. We create records of what comforts us, what brings us home.

I believe that tables where everyone feels welcome are playful and generous in their designs. The shapes of these tables are creative enough to accommodate our human bodies in all of their forms. Some of these tables are lower, with cushions close to the ground; others include high chairs for the littlest ones. Still others are surrounded by enormous couches in colors that hide our inevitable spills. These tables are defined as much by their forms as by the natural spaces around them, where we walk beside our fellow guests, pausing to look at the moon or at salmon in a stream, to be still together.

Tables where everyone feels welcome are able to accommodate great sorrow and great joy. Meals include time to visit the homes and bedsides of those who are not able to walk or to eat. We light candles, sit awhile. As Joy Harjo writes, “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live… / Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and / crying, eating of the last sweet bite.” At the tables I dream of, we feed those who are not able to feed themselves. We bear witness. We make room for the sounds of breathing, chewing, thinking, questioning. We practice patience. We pass the salt to a stranger.