I started to take down the pandemic table last week, but I just couldn’t finish the job. A year ago, in those first days of quarantine, I set up an 8-foot table in the middle of the garage and loaded it with things that our family and friends might need to survive the plague.

That table sagged in the beginning, stacked with beans, canned tomatoes, dried pasta, rice, polenta and soups — things that could get us through the worst of times. Eventually, masks and latex gloves and sanitizer were added to the mix, along with those hard-to-find paper goods.

The pile expanded and contracted as we used and replaced things, finally growing smaller during these past few months, until it looked like it might be time for the pandemic table to go. But I just couldn’t do it.

The vaccines are here, grandparents are finally hugging their grandchildren, daffodils are poking through the ground and the food chain never did collapse as we had feared. In spite of all that, it is still hard to believe the danger is over.

Grandma would have known exactly how that feels. She raised 13 children and two grandchildren on and off, about half of them through the Great Depression. Even in boom times, she worried that there might not be enough when the next disaster struck.

When she no longer had to, she still made the coffee soup that she invented when her Depression-era cupboard was bare. She boiled saved coffee grounds until she coaxed the last bit of flavor out of them, making a hot broth for dunking heels of dried bread.

Chicken soup always started with a scoop of mashed potatoes in the middle of the bowl, another trick that she used to stretch a little bit of meat a long way and make a meal that would “stick to your ribs.”

There was a Thanksgiving dinner decades before that she called “one of the luckiest days” of her life. Convinced that her family faced a holiday without a solid meal, she played two numbers for a half-penny each on Wednesday, and one of them hit. They ate well the next day.

She prodded everybody to eat more when the mills were booming and the fridge was packed. “You never know where your next meal will come from,” she said. “You’re not full. You’re just stalled.”

She was tough, but one old memory always made her cry. A hobo showed up at the back door during the Depression, looking for a meal. Food was especially short, and she lost her temper and snapped at him, driving him off. Minutes later she chased after him, remorseful, but never found him, and it broke her heart.

Even with all our blessings, I can’t shake those memories. That lingering unsettled feeling is in our DNA, inherited from all those who came before us and faced their own pandemics or wars or holocausts or depressions or crop failures.

But thinking about how tough they were and how they looked out for each other, it’s good to remember that we must have inherited some of that, too. Maybe I’ll just leave that pandemic table up a little bit longer.

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