Tile

I love small, ceramic tiles.  The kind used for bathrooms and back splashes.  I love how they look, how they feel, how they sound when they hit and rub together, how they smell...  I'm pretty sure something very happy must have happened in my childhood that had to do with tiles, because every time I walk down the tile aisle in the home improvement store, I get this feeling, kind of like when you have a really good dream, but you can't remember what it was about.

I wish I could remember more about the tiles, but I do remember this:  one of my earliest (and very few) childhood memories involved me helping my dad with tiles in the bathroom.  I couldn't have been older than 4 or 5, and I remember standing so proud, showing my big brother, who had just gotten out of the bath,  my dustpan full of tile pieces, warning him that he shouldn't come in because it was so messy!  I know there were other instances of me, my dad (a carpenter), and tile-I grew up on construction sites.  I can catch glimpses of tiles in boxes and admiring their beauty and I can remember the scraping of the trowel as my dad laid it down...  I'm not sure why I started thinking about tiles tonight, but I look forward to laying down my own bathroom tile one day!