I am still luxuriating in all the space we suddenly have here in this new house.

Do you know how many times I used to have to clear the dining room table at our last house? When the kids were home full-time I remember clearing art projects in the morning for lunch, and then clearing art projects again right before dinner.

Do you know what I have now? I have two tables. Two. Separate. Tables. Right now there is nothing on the kitchen table, and the dining room table has my grandmother’s flatware–which I recently inherited–laid out for organization. And a chess board.

The chess board has been set up for a couple weeks now and we’ve actually been playing chess much more regularly because of it.

My dad taught me how to play chess when I was little and I always enjoyed it. His chess pieces lived in one of those weird cookie tins that everyone seemed to have in the 90s. We also had a little electronic chess game: it was a physical chess board with little moveable pieces. You had to press the square the piece started on and then the square where the piece was going to show the computer your move. The squares had little red lights on them and the computer would light the square under the piece it wanted to move and then light up the square the piece was moving to. I played with that thing a lot.

I never beat the computer, and I never beat my dad.

I also never beat my husband until last week when I chased him all the way through the endgame and into checkmate. I was so proud of myself.

One of my main hopes for my children was that at least one of them would be a chess prodigy. This has not happened. Also neither of them is a piano prodigy and I don’t know what the point of kids is if they can’t fulfill all my own unfulfilled goals.

It’s lovely to be able to keep the chess board out and ready to go and I hope we keep this up.