the first scratch in the hardwood floors
I think one of the reasons that I like old things is that they are already worn. They wear scratches, dents, dings, chips, cracks, and crazing, and any new damage that is done to them will likely go unnoticed. They are already imperfect and there is no pressure to keep them pristine. Well, newly installed and freshly refinished hardwood floors do come with some amount of pressure to keep them scratch-free for as long as humanly possible. For me, that turned out to be less than 24 hours. I knew that these hardwood floors would scratch, because we have them on our stairs, in the dining room, my office, and 15-year-old floors in the kitchen and eating area. All of them are scratched to some degree from the pets, from furniture scooting, from dropping things, from kids, from life. I knew these floors, which are in the two most trafficked
