Sifting through my childhood memories, I’m still trying to make sense of things that were just so. I never questioned them .. until now.

I grew up in a house with beautiful parquet floors, and every Friday my mother would go down on her hands and knees to scrub the floor. Did they not have mops back then?  Then she’d polish it, by hand, also on her hands and knees. When we got home from school, one of us would be given the task to shine the floor with the polisher.

Wait – what? Shine the floor with a polisher? But the floor was already polished?

The machine was a devil.  It was deafening to operate. The beast was heavy, and the motor was powerful enough that it would pull the machine away from me. All I could do was follow it around the lounge and dining room, hoping it wouldn’t do too much damage as it banged into the furniture. My brothers did the job more often than I did – probably because I did such a poor job of it, so I wasn’t asked.

Once the wood floor was shiny, my mother would lay sheets of newspaper along the path that crossed between from the kitchen to the hallway. Just before my father came home from work the newspaper would be picked up.

I looked through old photos to find an image of that beautiful parquet floor and this was the only one I found. I love that it’s from my father’s old photo album with the little silver corners that held he picture in place. My father still has his tie on from a day at the office and I’m just ever so pleased with myself about something.

I love this picture.