November Writing Challenge, Day 6

The carpet.

The carpet was ugly, and it would have to go. The sooner the better. The living room carpet had long since been torn up and thrown out, exposing golden Clear Grade oak hardwood flooring. It wasn’t beautiful and perfect anymore, though. After almost 40 years of being suffocated by a truly hideous parade of carpeting ranging from a puke green to what was once a burnt orange shag, the hardwood was marred by spots where the rubber backing had stuck and countless staple holes. But it cleaned up okay, and until I could afford to have it refinished, it would have to stay. Strategically placed rugs were lain. The first rug was almost as bad as the carpet-a blood red rose design knockoff Oriental that what it lacked in beauty made up for in size. But it would have to do.

I had been promised that the hardwood floors ran the length of the house, except in the kitchen and bathrooms. I was fixing to find out. Next was the bedroom I was taking over, due to it having an en-suite bathroom. I had stayed in the master bedroom for years, but there was no discernable difference in size. The closet was the main attraction in there. I enlisted some help and it didn’t take long to rip the decades old carpet out. We got the hallway while we were at it. Indeed, the same hardwood greeted me under layers of grime. The bedroom didn’t take a lot of scrubbing to get the bits up, but I remember there was one staple that nearly broke me. I was ready to chew it out of the floor by the time it was done. The hallway was worse, as it had seen more traffic over the years. But it wasn’t too bad.

 I was working on a deadline; I had furniture to be delivered the next week and I wanted to have everything clean as possible and the walls painted so I wouldn’t be having to navigate around a bunch of obstacles. I got done (nothing like the last minute to banish my procrastinator tendencies), but when I would lay down at night, my arms would burn and quiver and I would have to eat an Ibuprofen to soothe the ache. It was the first true manual labor I ever performed. And when I finished the library floors, it was the last. I don’t know why the library was the hardest, but I was again working on a time constraint and I remember sitting in here scraping black gunk and pulling staples out with needle nose pliers and crying. I would snot into the bleach solution I went over the floor with twice before the pine sol and then wax and just keep going ’cause there wasn’t anybody coming to help me. I had to do it. And it was just work. At least it kept me occupied. It kept my mind off my Grandmother being gone forever, and Johnny being gone for what I thought was the rest of time. Maybe I was mourning for them, maybe I was crying because my arms hurt, or maybe I was crying because the elastic in my pantyhose was shot {Steel Magnolias plug}. The paint on the walls was still wet when the furniture was delivered, and I didn’t get the bookshelves moved over for a week. It was probably a month before I got all my books situated into some semblance of organization. Hardwood is hard work. Or it was one time, anyway. Thank God for Shug!

My Grandmother built this eight room, two story house as a newlywed, and somehow managed to pay it off in the midst of raising two heathen young’uns and working second shift in a factory. She divorced her husband before it was commonplace, and shot the dirt from under his feet when he called her bluff that the .38 wasn’t loaded.

And y’all think I’m crazy.

Our tastes aren’t similar, although that may have more to do with it being 1962 when she built this place, but I think both of us made it a home. She just didn’t like the work she thought you had to put in to maintain the gleaming floors (she had a buffer, for Pete’s sake), so she covered them up. I just let them peek out and don’t worry about the spots and stains. They’re still beautiful to me.