Floored at last

When this house was built by a builder we came to detest, slate flooring was trendy, apparently. We had no choice in the matter as when we drove from Manhattan to Wellfleet halfway through the actual building process, he had already ordered the slate and it was piled up outside. It was what he was doing that era. The slate was cold to the feet, oozed when it rained much or the humidity was just high and gave the rooms a cold palate. Over time individual slabs got loose and never really fit correctly again. But I lived with it for forty years, Finally we got to the point this year when we couldn’t stand it any longer. The grout between the slabs was dirty and wouldn’t clean. Several of the slabs were wobbly and many were loose. The floor always looked dirty. Two years ago we redid or rather more accurately, had the kitchen floor redone with vinyl in a warm attractive pattern. This week we finally had the diningroom redone with the same vinyl. it was a much easier and faster job than the previous because the earlier-done area is far more complicated: the kitchen itself, the area were the library table is, the area that leads to the back of the lower level – to the bathroom, the storage room, the laundry room, my assistant’s office, etc. The diningroom is a simple rectangle that sticks out from the rest of the house with windows on three sides, a pass-through over a cabinet and an open doorway on the side toward the house. It’s a lovely room with trees on one side, a slope with bushes and bulbs and flowering perennials on the other two sides. Most of the year there’s a feeder on two sides with many birds coming and going. The difficulty was moving everything out of there, packing up all our dishes, glassware, linens, drawers of tablecloths and napkins, outdoor gear like gloves – boxes and boxes of stuff. Then figuring out where to move all the furniture. My assistant came back to work Wednesday after a two and a half week honeymoon in Paris. Piles of what had to be done loomed. We couldn’t move the furniture until after she left work Wednesday and before the guys were coming on Thursday morning. It went much more quickly then the previous job. They were done before five. We went out to supper at one of our favorite restaurants, Russ & Marie’s. Then started moving things back. Friday morning we continued and got the house back to normal. Woody had painted the diningroom last week, a warmer color, sort of cream instead of dead white. Now I have the problem of finding curtains for three sets of very different sized windows. I made the curtains we’re discarding, but I no longer have a sewing machine or the desire to sit for three or four days making new ones. Woody is beginning to put the gardens to sleep while encouraging all the fall crops to keep producing. We are eating and giving away the last of the tomatoes. Tonight I’m making supper for Dale and Stephen who took care of the cats while we were in Maine last week. I’ll start with some bought hors d’oeuvres, then Greek lamb with our beans and tomatoes with a baguette from the French bakery and some kind of rice I haven’t figured out yet, a Greek salad and for dessert, our pears and our pumpkins in a pear-pumpkin pie. A way to celebrate out new looking diningroom even though the old blue-grey curtains are still hanging there, incongruously. Three new poems this week. A new physical therapist with new exercises that make me newly sore.