Our home has beautiful old hardwood floorboards, floorboards made from trees from Bellingen, they are really strong and are particularly lovely to look at, as long as your eyes keep away from those um, scratchy bits. However there is one room in this home that has carpet and that is our room and it is foul. It is grey and laden with dust, regardless of how often we vacuum, it is there lurking deep within the creases, it is so dusty that sometimes I even have to face inwards in bed just so I don't breathe in it's disgustingness. 'Rip it up', I hear you say and we hear you, we have our landlady's approval but the only thing is that strangely, it has been glued to the floorboards, crazy, we know. So we have peeked and realised that it is a big job, well one that needs helpers and possibly a shovel and a willingness to lose some skin off knuckles.
But unfortunately we haven't been able to find the time and we lived with it like that for a while, disgusting, yes. It took Jo, our landlady and some professionals weeks to do the rest of the house, she was so over it by then that she just stopped at our room.
Anyway, one night whilst I was away with Poe and Ilo in Sydney, I let myself fantasise about the possibility that Scott might just take this opportunity to strip the carpets whilst I was away, pretty saucy, hey, oh yeah.
You see, in my childhood whenever my mum would go away somewhere, for more than a night or so, my dad would do something to the house to um, err, surprise her. He used to get so excited unveiling the surprise but unfortunately for him the responses to the painted black wall or an 'interesting' and colourful new bathroom were not always what he expected. Luckily he did create some amazing surprises like a mirrored cupboard, a new bedroom for me for my 13th birthday (up in the attic no less), stunning stained glass windows and yes, the stripping of very old brown shag pile carpet and the polishing of the floorboards, looking back though, I do think his successes have been probably more than his um interesting, failures. As a child and teenager and then adult, my heart would always go out to my dad, as he always put so much effort in, he had so much vision and loved to surprise.
So, basically I was projecting all this onto Scott, without him even realising it, so I talked myself down and decided not to think about it.
And then we arrived home, it was delightful seeing Scott, we all really missed him and he really missed us, despite being shared around by the whole town every night we were away, two hour long baths and time spent with his guitar and laptop writing songs, oh and the silent house and no mess, oh yes, he really did miss us. And we could tell as soon as we saw him and hugged and kissed him, we were home. And home was clean, very clean and yes our room was especially delightful, the floorboards were on display in all their glory. I was speechless and delighted and rambled to Scott about wishes coming true, it was very special and so wonderfully sweet, yes sweet sweet air, I now take great pleasure in sleeping facing out and taking big luxurious breaths.
