We moved into our apartment midway through the pandemic, lured via Zoom walkthrough by six west-facing windows that flooded the kitchen with an alleyway’s worth of golden light. The view itself was nothing to speak of — dumpsters, power lines, the occasional good dog sighting — but the light was generous, forgiving, the kind that makes even a chipped coffee mug glow like stained glass. By then, the building had already established what I’ve come to think of, with reverence, as The Free Table.

The Free Table began as a kind of informal commons, a collision point of surplus and need. A jar of peanut butter here, a paperback novel there, a box of CSA vegetables surrendered in defeat, half of them inevitably yellow squash, which, as we learned together last week in The Bite, deserve more tend

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