Room for One More

I keep an extra mug in the cupboard that isn't really for me. It just sits there, clean, waiting, in case someone shows up I didn't know was coming.

That's most of what hospitality actually is, if you boil it down. Not the good napkins, not candles lit just so. It's having room for someone before you knew you'd need it.

I think about this more now that I run most of this on my own, day to day. It would be easy to only make enough coffee for the morning I'm actually having. One cup, one person, done. But I don't, usually. I set out two mugs even on days nobody's scheduled to walk through the door. Habit, maybe. Or just hope that someone will.

The Around the Table Mug is the one that gets pulled down for that more than anything else we make. It's plain on purpose. White, glossy, nothing shouting off the side of it. The kind of mug you can hand to someone you just met without it saying anything except: sit down, this is for you.

There's a version of hospitality that's mostly performance, the perfect table setting, the right music queued up. I'm not against any of that. But there's a quieter version too, and it's the one that actually holds up on a regular Tuesday when nothing's special except that someone's coming over. It's just: I thought of you before you got here.

Have you ever noticed how much of being welcomed well comes down to small, unglamorous preparation nobody mentions out loud? An extra chair pulled in. The matching spoons instead of the odd ones. A mug that isn't chipped.

I don't think hospitality needs to be much more complicated than that. It's deciding ahead of time that whoever walks in matters enough to be ready for, before they've done a single thing to earn it. That's the piece GiaNina keeps circling back to, one pot of coffee and one spare mug at a time.

If you've got a place at your table that could use a plain, steady mug waiting on the shelf for whoever shows up next, ours is there whenever you want it.

Choose to be kind. Choose to be grateful. Choose to be happy.

— Nina of GiaNina Collective