Music in the Floor

Ellen Simper

The bathroom squeak is one that speaks to me regularly as I careen through the pass-through room with laundry or on other errands of bathroomly importance. It gathers more verbiage if I happen to use the “other mirror” for doing hair. The rocking back and forth on that squeak which almost can’t be avoided these days is like a petulant child escalating its demands, going from a lower pitch to a higher pitch as my feet play on its whinings. The squeak in the entrance to my bedroom was the first I noticed almost 30 years ago, when the house was new to us and we were still in our luxury of ownership phase, and before we had made our family defining modifications to the house. It had a bell sound but was like a vague apparition living under that patch of floor. The friendly tinkle of it was almost an “Avon Calling” which no one nowadays remembers, but was a particularly delightful sentinel, walking in the master bedroom of my very own house.

It would seem that my floor apparitions are aging along with me. Whereas they were tight and sound as a 20 year old house, now that they are 30 years older, they are beginning to moan and whine as much as I do. They need a pain reliever as I do once in a while, although I can’t say what that might be.

Maybe their moans and wheedles are merely being expressed more now because of the fact that as sedentary empty nest-ers we are not as entertaining as the traffic and commotion the floor enjoyed when there were six other sets of feet in this house. Maybe my squeaks are lonely, wanting to make more vociferous conversation now that the uproar of 30 years of family life has been quelled.

Eight year old Sheridan, in particular has been fascinated with the sound of alive wood floors as opposed to the deadness and quiet of his home’s concrete floors. The music of the floor is obscured by the competing cacophony of grandkids when Sheridan and his ilk have set foot upon our house apparitions. It takes his urban ear to discover that there is music in the floor just waiting to be strummed by his feet. He plays the floor like tympanic skins stretched over the sounding vessels of the floor's undergirdings, which have been tuned by years of dust settling underneath and an unimaginable array of critters and debris. This un-finely tuned instrument responds to his mallet/feet at his renewed remembering of the musical floor and he comments on the timbre. Even when he is grumpily expressing opposition to the prevailing parental axiom, a stomping across the sonorous surface is a satisfying symphony.

Back to Writings


Contact the webmaster	Copyright 2005 Ellen Simper and Artful Insights.com