Another small dinner....just four of us. I think six or eight people are the best number for a dinner party, but lately for me it has been four or twelve. Oh well. Each occasion has its own combinations and rhythms. This one brought to us friends that live close by, but have been drawn up into their own lives for the past few months and have been therefore little seen. It was good to reconnect. The food turned out particularly well this time...flank steak tournados (spinners), roasted red potatoes, fresh green beans with bacon, and green salad...yum.
Since it was the first day of October I wanted the table to reflect the onset of autumn. I thought I might use the spider web runner, but then a flock of geese flew over, heading south, and I switched to the square tablecloth with the circling swans. The last farmers' market of the year yielded a beautiful bouquet of dahlias, zinnias and hypericum berries in fall colors, with a zing of hot pink and chartreuse to enliven the combination. They fit into my little iron cauldron very well. The square yellow Vietri plates that I rarely get to use looked best, and the green glasses that I used on my last summer table. Just-starting-to-turn finely articulated leaves from our Japanese maple tree paired with hypericum berries linked the plates with the dark kettle and the brown flowers in the bouquet. I felt like this setting expressed the moment in the wheeling season as well as it could and was satisfied with that.