Burled: having small knots that produce a distorted grain in wood

February 11, 1970

"My, Rella, it's… it's lovely," Molly said falteringly, gazing at the housewarming gift her mother-in-law had just brought over and set up in the middle of her kitchen. "How very generous for you and Septimus to give this to us."

Cedrella Weasley stood back to admire the full effect of the kitchen now that her gift sat squarely in the middle of it. Or rather, roundly in the middle of it. And not perfectly roundly either. Arthur's mother had brought them their very first piece of furniture for the new house: a rather roughly hewn wooden table, mostly round, but somewhat lop-sided and covered with burn marks, gashes, a paint stain or two, and small, bumpy knots that made it look, in Molly's opinion, as though the table had a bad case of acne. And what was more, it was the very table that had sat in Arthur's parents' kitchen for as long as he could remember.

Cedrella nodded approvingly. "It fits nice in here. I knew it would. Now you can stop eating your dinner off the floor, finally. Won't it be nice to sit around a table again?"

Molly nodded, forcing a smile as she looked at the ancient, scarred thing looking about ready to collapse in the kitchen of her new home, the first home that was hers to keep.

"Of course you'll have to get a new one eventually," Cedrella went on, fondly running a hand along the uneven surface, and Molly almost sighed with relief. This was only temporary, of course. Rella only wanted to get them off the floor. She wouldn't expect Molly to keep this eyesore in her house longer than it took to find a good replacement. "But I imagine you'll be able to get another good decade out of it at least."

"Oh – are you sure?" Molly said, heart sinking. "It's just that…well…"

"It looks old, doesn't it?" Cedrella nodded knowingly. "But I promise it's tougher than it looks."

Molly wasn't sure if that was possible. If tables could be indimidated, she was sure the coffee table in the sitting room was shaking like a leaf.

Cedrella's fingers stopped at one of the gouges in the surface, and she smiled nostalgically. "Bilius made that when he was nine," she said. "Helping me with dinner. I'd only given him a spoon to stir the soup with. Merlin knows how he did it, but I could never fix it. Septimus made this out of a rowan tree, you know. Very magically strong wood – that's why it's hasted as long as it has. But you can't alter it magically."

"Septimus made this?" Molly asked, caught by surprise.

Arthur's mother nodded. "Oh, yes. Insisted on it. He said 'the kitchen table is like the heart of a house'. And he wasn't having someone else make our heart." She shook her head, laughing to herself.

"I must have tried to get this burn out for six hours before he told me magic wouldn't work," she said, her hand leaping to a large white mark in the middle of the table. "We'd only had this a few weeks and I'd already marked it up. It was Rupert's birthday cake. The boys got me distracted – climbing the apple tree we used to have in the back garden before that storm blew it over. Nearly gave me heart failure swinging around in those branches. Anyway, the first cake burned while I was yelling at them to get down before they broke their necks. And the second one was barely done on time. I took it right out of the oven and set it on the table and the mark's been there ever since."

Molly took a few steps closer, examining the scarred surface of the table with a new curiosity.

"That's Arthur's," Cedrella said fondly, pointing to a bright blue paint stain. "He used to fiddle with those Muggle model kits, painting arrow-planes and contraptions like that. Spilled a whole pot of his paint one afternoon… oh, I was furious. We were having company that afternoon and he nearly ruined my good table cloth. But did that stop him messing about with paint on my table?"

She pointed to several other, considerably smaller smears of colored paint dotting the tabletop, shaking her head in exasperation.

"It's certainly seen a lot," Molly murmured, tracing over the marks with her fingertips and wondering about the stories behind them.

"That it has," Cedrella agreed. "It doesn't look perfect by any means, but then again if it did, I'd be embarrassed to show it to you. My sister's table is probably smooth and shiny as ever, but her house is awfully quiet and lonely, and she's much too uptight to let her son so much as do his homework on her good furniture. A perfect table is one of the worst things I could think of having…."

xXx

It took a bit of getting used to, but once her house started filling up with boys, once Bill's raspberry hand print marked the table leg, Charlie's spilled candle streaked across the grain, the twins' little teeth marks dug into the softened wood from when they started teething, Molly understood what her mother-in-law meant.

Eventually their family outgrew the little table, and it was moved into Arthur's shed in the garden, where he added to his collection of model paint stains. But even though the new, scrubbed wooden table that replaced it could be mended by magic, Molly left the burn marks from Bill and Charlie's record-setting exploding snap game, the dent from Ron accidentally running his wagon into the table leg, the initials Ginny carved into the underside of the table.

In fact, when she discovered the small GMW years later, Molly added her own MPW. Eventually the underside of the table would be covered with clusters of rough letters: VGW, TRL, DGW, FOW, JSP, RMW, ASP, LRW, PIW, LLP, CRW, GFW… any grandchild (or child at heart) who wanted to add their legacy to the unintended recorder of memories, the heart of the house.

A/N: Wow… this one got long. Way longer than I mean it to. Perhaps I didn't need so many initials, but I got rather carried away deciding who would end up under the table to find the letters and who would want to add to it and in what order… over analyzing a simple story. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading it! Please let me know what you think? Pretty please with Honeydukes chocolate on top?