Dinner with the family

The family get-together on July 4

Sunday night dinners are a family affair. I head over to my parents' house and find them hurrying around the kitchen.  Sometimes my father is patiently tending to meat on his grill  or my mother is chopping vegetables on her butcher block island. We sit at the table and clink our wine glasses to ensure a good week is just around the corner.

The dinner table is my parents' black granite-top table with its speckles of metallic colors that has traveled everywhere from my parent's eat-in kitchen in Goodlettsville, Tennessee to my basement kitchen in Salida, Colorado. From my seat, I see Sam, my parents' yellow lab, sprawled glumly on the floor of the laundry room floor, most likely bummed to be barricaded from snacking on fallen crumbs. Looking out the window, I watch Ashley and Oreo, two hens peck and bob around their coop and the occasional hummingbird zip around the multiple feeders that hang from the roof's edge. 

Once dinner is finished, my mother and I collect plates and I start washing them before my mother says to leave them and eat dessert. If I am lucky, my mother lets me take a piece of cake or few cookies back home to eat the next day. 

It's a comfortable, pleasant routine. But scattered throughout the year the routine gets pushed aside to make room for something new. When my sister brings her children along to dinner, it is something special. The table gets drag out from its usual position and white plastic chairs and wooden stools are placed around it. 

From the backyard, it is not the clucking of chickens or whirl of hummingbirds that you hear but the laughs, shrieks and cries of Mairen, Connor and Colin as they scurry around the yard. The storage shed door is thrown open to find bubble wands and volleyballs. The three of them love to play tag in all its various forms. 

At the dinner table, Colin will happily devour all the cherry tomatoes in the glass custard cup,  Marien will rejoice if there are any potato chips and Connor will declare everything on his plate to be delicious. 

But before the eating begins, there is quite a clatter of glasses bumping together as everyone attempts to touch everybody else's drinking glass and we all cry out, "cheers!" Meals like these, if feels like it is a guarantee that the approaching week will be a good one.