After living in an assortment of far-away cities, I returned to my home town, looking for a job. In one interview, the CEO said, "Your sister does such great work in our community!" "Yes," I said, "but I'm older and I taught her everything she knows." He laughed. It was funny. But it wasn't completely true.

I was older, but I certainly didn't teach my sister "everything she knew." The truth was, she taught me many things, even as a toddler. We were as different as night and day—and as irrevocably connected. I was serious and introverted. She was bubbly and a natural performer. She had honed a Louis Armstrong voice by age three and could get any neighborhood child to join her Fourth of July sunrise parades. I buried myself in books while she sat in front of the television, empathizing with the characters of Days of Our Lives. I carried crayons and paper from room to room; she, her tool belt, ready to start a "project."

The year I turned fifty, I decided to run a marathon. Not because I was a runner — I wasn't. I had never run more than a mile in my life. But I had just survived a divorce, a bankruptcy, and the death of my mother in the span of eighteen months, and I needed to prove something to myself. I needed to know that my body, which had carried me through so much grief, was still capable of something extraordinary.

I trained for seven months. I ran in the dark before my children woke up. I ran in the rain. I ran when my knees ached and my lungs burned and every sensible part of me said to stop. On the day of the race, I stood at the starting line surrounded by thousands of strangers, and I felt, for the first time in years, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

My son had been missing for three days when the phone rang at two in the morning. I had not slept. I had barely eaten. I had prayed in a way I had never prayed before — not the polite, Sunday-morning kind of prayer, but the desperate, bargaining, on-my-knees-on-the-kitchen-floor kind. The kind where you stop pretending you are in control of anything.

The voice on the other end of the line was a stranger's. He had found my son wandering on a highway two states away, confused and frightened but unharmed. He had stopped his car, wrapped my son in a blanket from his trunk, and stayed with him until the police arrived. He had found my number in my son's jacket pocket.

When the doctor told me I was going blind, I thought he was talking about someone else. I was thirty-one years old. I had two small children. I had plans. Blindness was not in the plans.

The disease progressed exactly as he said it would. Within two years I could no longer read to my children at bedtime. Within four years I could no longer see their faces. I learned to navigate my house by memory, to recognize my sons by the sound of their footsteps, to read the world through my fingertips and my ears.

Our kitchen table was not a piece of furniture. It was the center of the universe. It was where my mother rolled out pie crust on Tuesday afternoons and where my father read the newspaper in sections, trading pages with whoever sat across from him. It was where we did homework and argued about politics and celebrated birthdays with lopsided cakes. It was where my grandmother taught me to play gin rummy and where I learned, at the age of nine, that my grandfather had died.

I have lived in eleven houses since I left my parents' home. Each one had a kitchen table. None of them was the same. But each one became, in its own way, the center of something — a marriage, a family, a friendship, a life. I have come to believe that the kitchen table is where civilization actually happens. Not in boardrooms or parliaments or cathedrals, but around a table where someone has made something warm to eat and everyone has agreed, for the moment, to sit down together.