OK, that’s an awfully fancy-sounding word for a blog dedicated to living simply, I know, but the focus on “dining” today is part of the ongoing process of rethinking spaces in our house and trying to clear and polish them enough to show off their particular purpose and utility. So today’s challenge: the dining room, which for the longest time has served primarily as the landing pad for our house, since it is the first room we enter when coming in the front door.

We do have an office of sorts upstairs–another space needing a major overhaul–but the dining room table is just too convenient a place to pile up bills, and magazines (and catalogs of course!) along with school papers, and book bags, and lunch boxes, and so on.

So today (yes, another snow day) I cleared out the entire room of anything that didn’t help declare this room as a place for eating. OK, I did leave a small container to hold bills, and there’s a glass bowl on the table by the door leading outside for car keys, and a chair for a briefcase or a book bag–but other than that, I removed all the unnecessary clutter from this room and tried to return it to its use as a place for gathering around a meal.

Now I wouldn’t expect us to eat every meal in this room, but certainly we could eat more meals here. We talked over dinner tonight (burritos–just to counteract the fanciness of eating in a dining room, I suppose) about what was different eating here instead of in the kitchen. From my three kids I got: “It’s cozier,” “We can see each other better because we are sitting right across from each other,” and “It feels more special.”

I definitely felt we were more present for the meal, that’s for sure. And the burritos tasted especially yummy.

Coincidence? I think not!