Hardwood Floor Staining Quotes

We followed him through the wealthy splendor of the house. Hardwood floors. Custom carved woodworking. Statues. Fountains. Suits of armor. Original painting, one of them a van Gogh. Stained-glass windows. Household staff in formal uniform. I kept expecting to come across a flock of peacocks roaming the halls, or maybe a pet cheetah in a diamond-studded collar.

George could dig and pour the concrete basement for a house. He could saw the lumber and nail the frame. He could wire the rooms and fit the plumbing. He could hang the drywall. He could lay the floors and shingle the roof. He could build the brick steps. He could point the windows and paint the sashes. But he could not throw a ball or walk a mile; he hated exercise, and once he took early retirement at sixty he never had his heart rate up again if he could help it, and even then only if it were to whack through some heavy brush to get to a good trout pool. Lack of exercise might have been the reason that, when he had his first radiation treatment for the cancer in his groin, his legs swelled up like two dead seals on a beach and then turned as hard as lumber. Before he was bedridden, he walked as if he were an amputee from a war that predated modern prosthetics; he tottered as if two hardwood legs hinged with iron pins were buckled to his waist. When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture. Once, she snorted out loud, trying to stifle a laugh, when she thought, My husband, the table. She felt so bad afterward that she wept.

We’re pattern-seeking creatures. There’s even a word for it: apophenia. We constantly make connections between completely unrelated things, tease meaningful patterns from meaningless noise, and find familiar objects in the world around us. We see the man in the moon, or climbing kudzu looks like a crucified man, or a blackish stain on a hardwood floor stares right back at us. Birds make smiling faces in the New Mexico sky. The world is a mirror, and our tendency to see ourselves in it was once a matter of survival. As soon as a baby can see, she recognizes the human face. The baby smiles at the sight, and her mother picks her up, holds her tight, loves her, protects her. See . . . survival.

Rain giving way to a spectacular sun. Its rays speckling through the stained glass, dancing off the hardwood floors. The orchestra’s music lifting through the open windows and out over the block as though it had always belonged to the Brooklyn air.