Rain in my boots once taught me
that misery seeps upward,
one cold inch at a time.
Feet chilled, blood chilled,
the whole body tricked
into believing joy was impossible.
Life does this too:
one regret, one old grief
running its circuit like a tide,
turning the warm current
into undertow.
Today, I’m on my knees,
teaching how to lay flooring.
Snap, click, measure, cut.
Start at the wall, but first,
consider the room.
Is it square? Never.
No life is.
So we cheat the lines,
shift the planks,
make crooked look straight,
knowing that perfection
is a myth hung on a level,
and the eye
always follows the horizon.
The ocean whispers the same:
don’t fight the angles,
flow with them.
Start not with fullness,
but with what will balance the ending.
Lay your boards in the direction
people will walk.
Lay your heart in the direction
it longs to be carried.
And when the gaps show,
when the boards shrink in winter
or swell in summer,
cover them with trim,
with kindness, with rugs of memory.
No craft is flawless.
No tide eternal.
But the room feels whole
when you stand back,
the way the ocean feels whole
even as it breaks
into crooked waves.
Measure twice.
Cut once.
Then let go—
because in twenty years
the floor will be gone,
but the lesson remains:
we only ever lay down
what we can live with,
not forever,
but for now.
BB Grey--musings 
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