Hardwood Floors

Hardwood floors are wonderful. I had them in my old house, I have them now. They are cool in the summer and warm and glowing in the winter. They feel good against your bare feet. However they are not nice to sleep on. They are HARD. So why, you ask, am I sleeping on the floor? Is it because I have drunk too much Australian Shiraz? No, it’s because we have NO furniture. Our furniture, indeed almost everything we own in the world including my extra contact lenses, bed pillows and a hundred pairs of shoes, languish in a warehouse in Poughkeepsie New York. This would be fine if we were also in Poughkeepsie NY because then we could break into the warehouse and sleep in our own beds. Unfortunately we are here: About sixteen hours away by car. Well, not exactly unfortunately because it is beautiful and a temperate 80 degrees rather than the awful 100+ weather NY is currently enduring. (And nothing makes Poughkeepsie a pleasant place to be in any case. Worst college town ever!) Sorry! So anyway, I started thinking about how things can be good but then they can also be bad depending on your perspective or your situation. In our present case, floors made out of marshmallows would be good but sticky. We could sink into them. They would envelop us. But in normal times, marshmallow floors would be pest-ridden and impossible to clean properly. Why do they only come in white? The heroine of my new WIP (which I have designated with the title “BD”) is flung from the familiar to the strange, and she doesn’t like it one little bit. She has decided from the outset to be angry and unimpressed with anything, and so her perspective is skewed and it all looks ugly to her. Eventually she’ll come round and realize that much of these feelings lie in strangeness and unfamiliarity. And eventually I will either become used to sleeping on a hard floor like a monk, Or I will receive my mattresses and view my beautiful new floors from the height they were meant to be admired at.