A Long Winter's Night

I had become the Tile Queen of Douglasville. We were living in a camper with four kids. It was 1997 and we were knee-deep into the second year of a house-building project. Some people said, "Oh yeah, we built our house." No. We really built our house. Ourselves. With our own hands. 

I really hate carpet. It might be warm and pretty and it only takes a minute to vacuum it, but it gets nasty and full of germs and dust. When we built that house, there was to be no carpet. Only tile and pine floors. I went to Home Depot, where they have little classes on how to tile. Someone gave us acres of beautiful green Italian tile out of a dumpster, so we added an equal amount of cream-colored partners to it and borrowed a friend's giant masonry saw. It was January, cold as mess, and we had deadlines to keep. One of our sons was my cutter and I was the layer. Yes, I was the laying fool, wearing out my joints, knees, fingers and toes. We wound up putting in 1800 square feet of tile, all told. I had been working on it for a month solid. Ken had tons of vacation time back then, so he was home for the whole month, but working on other things. He apparently never learned how to lay tile.

I had one more room to finish -- the (really big) master bathroom. Don't ask me why (except that it was 1997), but I chose tile that looked like pink marble. The jacuzzi tub deck was done in a sandy pink. I'm sure the current owners of that home would like to shoot somebody over that. I woke up that January day, the temperature dipping down into the 20s. We only had space heaters in the house, but I was determined to finish that bathroom. I made up a big container of mud for the floor and got to work. Over this long project, my pretty piano hands now looked like meathooks. Thick, crabby, calloused and kind-of in a permanently curled position. It was cold, I was bone weary, and sick of the whole thing. I got about 3/4s of the way through my bucket when I simply shut down. I couldn't get warm and I was so tired, I couldn't see straight. I threw my tool in the bucket and started crying. Then I started wailing. Ken came running, "What's the matter?!" "I'm cold. I'm tired. I can't feel my fingers." Ken, his normal, practical self, looked into the container and said, "Well, how 'bout you finish up that bit of mud. Go into the camper and get a really hot shower and get in your sleeping bag and go to sleep." I squawled: "But ya'll need lunch and I don't want to think about lunch." He said not to worry about it, he'd take care of it. So I did just that. Got in the blissfully hot shower, went ahead and put on my pajamas so I'd be comfortable, climbed in my sleeping bag and zipped it clean on up. Mind you, our bed was in the "living room" of the camper. 

Ken and our four children came in a couple of hours later, ate lunch, cleaned up, went back out to work, ate supper, cleaned up, had showers, went to bed, got up, ate breakfast, went to work, ate lunch again. Ken said he checked on my breathing several times to make sure I wasn't dead. I woke up promptly at 1:00 the next afternoon, after approximately 26 hours of sleep, never hearing a thing or waking up once.

Ken wisely waited a few days before he broached the subject of finishing the tile. He might have even contemplated doing it himself but I was a little diva-ish about anything I started. The day I announced I was going to finish, he said, "Whoa, give me a few minutes." He went up to the bathroom, turned the space heater on full force, laid out all my tools, gave me a vigorous back massage, and said okay now go. He kept bringing me drinks and refreshments all day, he and the children speaking in hushed, reverent tones. I believe we ate out that night. 

My hands never did really recover from that winter. I now have man hands that curve in strange directions and I twitch slightly when I walk. But there came a day when we moved in and had a lot to be proud of. Just don't ask me to lay a piece of tile again. Ever.