Honey, I shrunk the table

"The table, it's smaller," Rick called. We'd just gotten back from three weeks in the South of France and were alone in the house. Housemate J was in the mountains, and my daughter was babysitting a St. Bernard named Einstein (not a reflection of his intelligence) and a cat named Newton (a reflection of his intelligence) in Schwyz.

It was gone...The huge table top that one could almost sleep on and instead of the original coffee table shown above was back.

There's a back story. Almost four years ago J, decided to give a much loved painting to a museum in Northern Germany (which led to my writing Murder on Insel Poel, now under contract). To protect the large painting, she asked for the measurements of the car that would pick up the painting and then had a box made to fit those measurements.

Something went wrong.

The painting was picked up but would not fit in the car with the box.

J did not want to waste the considerable sum she'd spent to have the box custom made. Since it was made of pressed wood, it wasn't very attractive, but we decided to use it as a coffee table anyway. The back-up plan would have been to use it as the previously mentioned double bed to sleep on.

Once covered in a bright red cloth it occupied a good part of the living room where it saw numerable celebration dinners and aperos and held bouquets of flowers and decorative candles. The table itself was a conversation piece. We grew to love it--kind of...

Since J is still in the mountains, I assume the temporary table went out in the trash on the day they pick up large objects and electrical thingies. I'll find out later when she comes off the mountain to a dinner and a Leonard Cohen concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

The living room looks a LOT BIGGER with the shrunken coffee table.