Porous & Imperfect

On the nature of skin and stone

When I think of the skin on my arms and legs, I can envision their specific constellations of freckles and landmarks of scars, and I consider them, along with the newly forming ravines of wrinkles, as geographical paragraphs from my body’s singular memoir.

On my left thigh live two pale scars. Straight lines, about four inches apart, eagerly earned as a pre-pubescent child while playing outside and running into some kind of thorny shrub. The scars have faded over the decades, but I can still see them, and I do remember the moment I saw all the blood on my bare leg and wondered if the cuts would leave a lasting mark.

More recently, I welcomed a fairly deep gash on the front of my right calf. Patience would have prevented this, but I was in a hurry to rescue a jade plant from its cramped quarters. In hindsight there were certainly better methods of freeing the jade, but at that time, slamming the clay pot against a large boulder seemed like the best one. I did succeed in releasing the jade plant, which I celebrated by taking a trip to Seattle’s Capitol Hill Urgent Care clinic for stitches.

Scars are the librarians of stories. They keep us versed in the language of our mortality. Personally I’ve never minded my own. I never had designs to be a model of any kind, so roughing up my flesh hasn’t phased me much over the years. But tolerance for imperfection on my own body hasn’t spilled over to how I approach kitchen counters. In the house of my dreams, all surfaces are smooth and impermeable, with nothing to indicate they’ve ever been misused.

So when I sold a house with shining, granite counters that looked the same as the day I had moved in seven years earlier, and bought an 18-year old house with limestone counters, I had to do some quick math: How much money would it take to replace those counters? Because of all the things I found to love about the new house, the limestone counters were last on my list.

Limestone! I would never have chosen such a material, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone else would either. And then there was the color: a deep forest green. Though speckly and swirled, it was too saturated, too moody for my taste. But there was enough to love about the house beyond this unfortunate countertop selection by the previous home owners that I vowed to make do with the all the square feet of it until a windfall showed up in my bank account.

But how to live properly with it? My mother was not one for insisting on manners. She didn’t ask me to write Thank You notes to people who gave me gifts or spend any amount of time teaching me how to set a table (mostly because forks and knives are not necessary when you’re eating McDonald’s or KFC.) But the one thing she drilled into me was that it was never ok, under any circumstances, to put a drinking glass—hot or cold—on a surface without using a coaster. That lesson was so keenly delivered that I thought everyone else in the world must have received it. I have since realized that not everyone has been provided this survival tip.

The previous owners of my current house had three children. My neighbor told me this, but I could have figured it out on my own. As children do, they left evidence of their presence everywhere: paint on the floor, paint on the outlet sockets, handprints in cement blocks in the garden. When I find their outdoor playthings—mostly balls—in the woods, I set them in ‘The Garden of Broken and Found Objects,’ the area of the yard which marks the start of the trail. I smile whenever I find another child’s possession, and I recall the sporting good’s store-worth of tennis balls, baseballs, basketballs and footballs that my siblings and I lost in the nasty juniper bushes that were planted on the side of the carport. (You had to really want to keep playing to walk in there and look for the missing ball.)

But finding stains and rings on the counters during the first few years of living in this house gave me no such warm feeling. Broken objects decomposing in the woods is one thing. Non-fading marks of imperfect housekeeping are another. I cursed and scratched my head and asked myself unanswerable questions: Did no one teach these people to use a coaster? Had they never heard of a hot pad?

So I read up on limestone — what to clean it with, how often to polish and reseal it. I learned that removing stains from natural stone can be done using a poultice in the same way a compress composed of leaves and liniments can be used to relieve swelling or burns on the human body.

And then one nondescript, ordinary day, while wiping down the kitchen counters, it struck me. The light outside changed, bringing out the brighter greens of the needles of the conifers. Where the sun was strongest, I could see into the heart of the trees, all the way to the bark’s beautiful rough ridges. The light changed everything about the kitchen, and I looked down at my green, limestone counters that I had disliked every day and hour until this moment. I looked closely at it, at its intricate waves of interior texture, only visible, because it had been cut at such an angle. I took a picture of the surface, for photographs help me to see further into whatever the image has frozen. I looked at the photo, then the counter.

“Oh, I get it! The limestone is alive!”

As the revelation continued to wind its way through my blood, I looked for My Beloved to tell him I had experienced a major emotional breakthrough in my relationship with our kitchen counter. Not only could I now see that our counter’s patina was not an assortment of fatal flaws, but I would no longer be telling him how much I couldn’t stand them, and asking when he would be ready to admit we needed to replace them.

My Beloved wasn’t phased by my observation. When I admitted I was starting to like the little marks and rings and faint etchings, he said, “Exactly. It has a history, which is what makes it beautiful.” Being from the Czech Republic, everything built in the United States looks five minutes old to him, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by his early enlightenment. And while it remains to be seen if the right poultice can remove the stain we’ve contributed when we descaled our Kitchen Aid Nespresso machine, and failed to use a large enough container to handle the amount of solution oozing out of it, I’m ready to live with this limestone’s imperfections and all the implications of its porousness.

Thank you for reading.

{| AC

I still can’t figure out what made that stain on the bottom left.

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The Garden of Broken and Found Objects, overseen by Winchester, our esteemed garden rabbit who lost his nose falling down in a wind storm.