Sweeping Old Wood Floors

Written by Matthew Ranville sometime in 2023.
Matt loves biking, exploring, playing hockey, hanging with his trusty pup, and his cool wife, Erin. Matt writes for fun (and for work), and we think he should keep writing fun things about camp because this one, and the other stories he has written for us, are just so great.

You cannot clean an old wood floor.

Yet there I was, sweeping away, watching dirt and fuzz skitter about, often carried by the light current of air in all the wrong directions. The sand I was trying to sweep away mocked me, sliding into every crack in the wood floor of Esau. It was right there, visible, sitting just millimeters out of reach of the bristles.

I swept in another direction, and some came out, but the minute I tried to collect it into a pile, it slid back into the cracks leaving me with a forlorn looking dust pan.

The sand came in on my feet, and others' feet, over a few days’ time. It was as if every visit to the beach, every walk on a sandy trail or dirt path, brought just a little more, no matter how often we left our shoes outside, rinsed our feet before coming in. Even a short walk to Fletcher and back seemed to carry more of it.

I'm not sure how long I swept, but I had to finally make peace with the dirt I could not remove, the sand, still laughing at my best broom work. It is a good thing to sweep the floors, but it is also an imperfect thing.

And maybe that's for the best. We all carry things in, whether we mean to or not, and we all leave some of that behind, though we try our best. Maybe the floor should never be free of the sand of our adventures. To make the floor perfect would be to deny that we had been there, that others were there before us, with us, and will be after us.