Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Re-staining.

What can I say about February? We've had snow and rain, as can be expected.  We've had Valentine's Day (which I still don't support one socially recognised day to acknowledge one relationship exclusively, and thus tried to spread out to see several treasured people); I went to Le Crocodile for fine French cuisine - passed on the fois gras but had escargot and liked the frogs legs in a broth rather than deep fried I had last year, and then a very nice caribou meal.  The next day I had a casual seafood melt at Speedy's pub on the river in Ladner for Valentine's Day brunch.
I skipped the Chinese New Year festivities in Chinatown, as the weather and crowds seemed less appealing than a lazy comfortable time among friends.
I should get going, on what I do not yet know.  There is my usual restless need for spring and better weather and opportunities, yet close memories of last year are uncomfortable and never far from mind.
In my travels I've found that places are like secondhand furniture: I'm not the first one to 'own' it and many have been here before, but it's new to me and now that it's with me I will personalise it to make it mine.  Sometimes that means sanding, stripping, refinishing, polishing, painting.  For wood this can be staining.  Old stains from many careless coffee cups on a table without coasters, spilled sauce or leaky pens, or perhaps a deliberate decorative stain that was meticulously done with care but just doesn't suit the new owner.  Maybe it's an accidental spill, or ugly blemish, or just outdated color.  It all soaks into the grain and can take much sanding to remove, or else find a way to re-stain it to some satisfactory condition I can live with.  That's where I'm at now.  Some places I was happy there I hesitate to revisit just because they're beautiful as I remember them, like Ireland.  Some routes I tread frequently like my childhood stomping grounds, and have enough associations both good and bad that it seems a multilayered spattering of nothing specific, just familiarity like an old workbench with the history of many projects.  And some places need to be re-stained, a way to reclaim them.  Given my typically very good memory of what happened where and when (perhaps I should've been a museum archivist or such), I ruminate carefully on the size, depth and degree of these stains to best choose what to accentuate and what to 'fix'.