Dinner conversations. Don’t you love the times when friends and family linger long after the meal is finished, the stories stretching and intertwining like the threads of an invisible web as diners lean back in their chairs, push plates toward the center, and get comfortable? As the food slowly congeals and the ice tea goes watery, a silent pact weaves through the group, a hidden understanding that nobody, but nobody should move from the circle. The minute someone does, the spell will be broken. The dishes will need to be done, the food put away, the evening’s activities relocated–probably to a room with a TV in it, where mindless entertainment will take the place of good conversation.
There’s nothing better than good conversation around the table. You never know what will provide the spark, but stories are like tinder. One tale lights the tip of another, and another, and another. In this fast-food and TV generation, it seems like it’s harder to find that initial spark. Sit down for a meal with teenagers or hurried businesspeople at a conference, and so often these days you’ll find more more cell phones than conversations.
We Belles are headed to the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) conference in a couple weeks. We’ll be gathering with booksellers, bloggers, and book lovers from across the South to celebrate the love of story. As storytellers, we thought it would be interesting to offer up sets of “conversation starter” cards, designed to spark some fine conversations around tables at the conference, and around tables back home after attendees leave.
We love all of you who stop in and spend time on the porch with us here at BelleView, so we thought, Why not include the BelleView community in the Table Talker story circle? For the next ten weeks, we’ll be sharing a card each week and letting that spark start a conversation here on the porch. We hope you’ll gather ’round with us and share a few tales of your own, then print the cards out and enjoy them at your next family dinner, holiday party, book club gathering, or business meeting!
My Childhood Adventure Story:
When I think of childhood adventures shared with my brothers and cousins, I think of my grandparents’ farm in northern Michigan. As suburban kids who lived halfway across the country from our cousins and grandparents, we treasured our summer visits to the old farm in New Era. By the time we knew this frontier homestead, it was no longer an active farm. The apple orchards were overgrown with feathery grass that stretched over our heads, and the blackberry vines grew wild across the rows. We kids built forts in the sumac groves, and gave grand names to all our favorite climbing trees. The Monkey Bar Tree, and The Lion Bar Tree, and Cinderella’s Castle are the stuff of childhood legend, still. We each owned branches of our own, and carved our initials into the bark to prove it. We made trails to all our favorite places, cleared a sand pile on the hill behind the barn, and climbed in the cherry orchard at Old Pat’s farm next door. We ate cherries until we were too sick to do anything but lie in the dunes and watch the clouds pass over.
At night, we spent time around the fire pit, cooking out and listening as the grown-ups told stories. There’s nothing in my memory sweeter than those hours of being surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, and grandparents… and yes, some truly great stories.
The old farmhouse listed slightly after years of being battered by the up-north winter winds. The floors were chilly in the mornings, even in the summertime, and the old potbellied stove belched out smoky smells when my grandpa fired it up as we played Crazy 8’s around the kitchen table on cold nights. At bedtime, we kids climbed the tall, uneven stairs to the attic loft and skittered into bed as the night wind moaned around the sashes, rattling the wood-paned windows on either end. The space under the old trusses was filled with beds, and as we wormed our way under the quilts, the older kids told tales of the Boogie Man and scared the younger ones (like me) half out of our wits.
Nothing on the farm quite matched the unadulterated joy of taking tractor rides behind the rusty orange tractor that came with the place. Grandpa kept an old Coke can over the exhaust pipe, and the tractor had to be started with an S-bar crank in the front. It was a thrill whenever someone forgot to remove the Coke can before cranking the engine, and the engine started with a cough and a puff, blowing the can into the air. We kids rode many miles behind that old tractor and loved every one of them.
New On Shelves — The Latest Moses Lake Book
Click here to read the first Chapter!
