There’s a moment each day when I sit down at the table.

Sometimes it’s with a cup of coffee gone lukewarm, sometimes with crumbs still scattered from breakfast, sometimes with nothing but a quiet stretch of time before the house needs me again.

Lately, that moment has felt like a return.

My red formica table was a gift from my parents when I moved away for college. It followed me west and eventually made its home in the breakfast nook of my kitchen. The four red vinyl chairs that surround it seat some of the most important people in my life on a daily basis.

We gather there in the mornings, the world still dark beyond the windows. Milk is poured over cereal, juice spills from cups, and sticky crumbs of toast and honey find their way to the floor. School lunches wait on the cutting board, ready to be packed into lunchboxes for little hands to carry away from home.

We watch as the sun peeks up from behind the treeline, welcoming a new day just as my oldest runs out the door for school. A hush settles — only for a moment — before little feet slap across the tiled floor and tiny hands reach for my pant legs.

Soon we’re dancing circles around the kitchen, piling playdough onto the tabletop and rolling, and rolling, and rolling until it’s flat and ready for shape cutting. The coffee pot comes to life, filling the kitchen with its earthy aroma and the promise of a hot cup in hand. More often than not, it goes cold on the counter while we sit and watch birds begin to flit between the feeders outside the kitchen windows. Spritely nuthatches hang upside down while the rat-a-tat-tat of a woodpecker carries through the morning as it digs for suet.

It was somewhere between the spilled cereal and the cold coffee that I realized I wasn’t hurrying away from the table anymore.

There was a time when I sat here with a list running through my head — what needed doing next, what I should be capturing, what couldn’t be forgotten. The table was a stopping place then, not a resting one.

Lately, I come with less. Fewer plans. Fewer expectations. I don’t bring the need to document every moment or prove that the days are full. I bring myself, and that feels like enough.

The light changes while we sit there. Morning stretches into something brighter, shadows moving across the floor, the table holding it all without asking anything of us. It looks the same when I leave it. Crumbs still scattered, a mug ring faint on the surface, chairs pushed back just enough to show where we sat. Nothing needs straightening right away.

And maybe the cold coffee was the point.
These busy mornings — loud, interrupted, unfinished — were the ones I dreamed of for years, after all.