There’s a lot of life on our porch these days – flowers, chickens, cats, and now, tarpaulin to cover the plywood going on our new tile floor in the kitchen.  Maria is not what you might call domestic. I have socks hanging in various corners of the farmhouse – on the wood stove, the mantel, the dining room chairs. None are dry but we are making progress. Maria is not a regular visitor to the kitchen, she likes to buzz in and wash dishes and uses the kitchen as a thruway to get to her Schoolhouse Studio.

She is my grandmother’s worst nightmare – Christian, an artist, she is allergic to vacuuming, order and shopping. When we visited my grandmother’s grave in Providence I told her she was right about some things, like cleaning and shopping, wrong about others. It is good to be loved, Grandma, I told her. I doubt she ever considered that, but I think she got that I am happy.

It is amazing to me how obsessed Maria has become with the idea of a new kitchen floor. She was waiting all day for the tile man to come (he didn’t show), leaving notes on the door, scanning the road for his truck. She complains daily – many times a day – about the filthy old linoleum floor, glowering at me as if I don’t get it or am obstructing the new tiles. She badgered me for weeks until I called the tile man, and I think she may run off to Europe with him, they love to talk tiles together. Maria  spent an hour or so laying out the new tiles on the floor tonight, trying different random color schemes and patterns – there are two colors, dark and light blue. She asked me for my opinion a dozen times, even though I know she is not interested in my color or design preferences.

“What do you think?,” she asked, moving a tile in the opposite direction that I had suggested.

And then, finally, I got it. It’s an artistic thing, an aesthetic thing. The tiles are bland ugly, dirty. Not artistic in any way. When I saw her stretching the tiles out, staring at them, pondering and mumbling, I realized this was just what she does when she makes a quilt, she studies a pile of scattered fabric and she can see the quilt in her curious artistic mind. This, I remember, is what dogs think, they run images through their mind, and their powerful instincts react to them.

It’s a quilt on the floor! No wonder. I hope Joe shows up Monday, otherwise I am taking Red and going on a long hike.