For Wilshire Baptist Church
Saturday morning we gave our turquoise table a fresh coat of paint in preparation for better days in the neighborhood.
In case you aren’t familiar, the turquoise table movement was started in Austin in 2013 by Kristin Schell, who one day realized she didn’t know her neighbors. She bought an inexpensive picnic table, painted it her favorite color, and put it out in her front yard where people would see it and perhaps stop to visit. The idea caught on and now there is a web site and a book and thousands of tables registered worldwide. We got our table in 2018 when Wilshire bought a few and invited folks to paint them, take them home and host events.
We live on a corner and our table is on the side yard where it can be seen from two streets. We’ve had neighborhood picnics, dessert gatherings and water stops for downtown parade participants and high school students walking home. We’ve sat at the table while taking a break from yard work, or brought out our laptops and iPads when doing our regular work. From there we can hear the kids playing across the way at the church daycare center and the bells chime the hours from the Catholic church a few blocks further. We also can wave at cars and talk to walkers.
You need to understand that I’m an introvert and hospitality is not my gift; inviting people over is not my default setting. But the turquoise table sort of helps that happen organically. I don’t know if it’s the site of people sitting in their yard or that bright turquoise color, but you can just be there and people will stop for a moment.
Sometimes you don’t have to be there at all. We’ve had church friends like the Hallmans sit at the table and eat ice cream while out on a walk. Someone painted a landscape rock with “Welcome” on one side and “The Hamptons” on the other and placed it on the table. That was a great anonymous surprise and we left it there as an invitation. One day the rock disappeared and then a few weeks later LeAnn came upon it at a nearby church rock garden and brought it home. But then it disappeared again and we’ve been missing it for months now.
I mow around and under the table, and when I mowed for the first time this spring, I found that one of the seat boards had rotted at one end and had become soft and splintery. So we went to Home Depot and got a replacement board and screwed it down. And then we needed to paint it, of course, and we did this past Saturday morning. The new board made the rest of the table look dull, but we had enough paint to cover the whole table and that’s what we did.
While we were painting, our neighbor Mary walked over from across the corner to deliver a donation for a neighborhood effort at the special ed school down the street. She told us about their upcoming travels and we told her we’d keep an eye on things, and then we talked about our garden and her garden and what had survived the February freeze and what hadn’t.
Mary was one of the first neighbors to come see us when we moved into the house nine years ago. She saw us digging out an area on our front walk where we were going to place flagstone and she just showed up with her shovel and started digging alongside us. She had some advice to offer, too, about how we were going about this do-it-yourself project, and I’ll admit I was taken aback and thinking, “who is this woman and why is she bothering us.” But we’ve learned over the years that her advice and that of her husband Ray is always based on experience and is always correct. And more than a few times they’ve come to our aid on a moment’s notice, and we’ve tried to reciprocate.
After talking awhile on Saturday, Mary said goodbye and we got back to painting, but she was back a few minutes later with some packets of seeds harvested from her own yard and instructions for when and where to plant them. Already our beds are full of cone flowers, vitex trees and other blooming plants that came from her yard, and these new seeds were from the purple larkspur that we’ve admired on her side yard.
We haven’t hosted any neighborhood events at the table during the pandemic, but it became our place for socially distanced outdoor dinners with friends who we couldn’t meet at restaurants or invite indoors. We’ve set up a card table a few feet away and placed one couple at that table and the other at the turquoise table. But now with the pandemic fading on the horizon behind us, we’ll be ready to have friends join us inside again.
On the other hand, when the weather is nice, maybe we’ll invite people to meet us at the turquoise table for dinner. Instead of spreading out, we’ll sit face-to-face. With a new coat of paint, the table is ready.