Around 6:15 am the sun pokes through the glass window above our patio door. As a child before having to go to school I would lay down in the sun spot, laying my face against the citrus and wood smelling floors. I would close my eyes and sink deep into wood floors to be come part of them. Often enough I would awake to the steam whistle of my mother’s pressure cooker, three whistles would let me know breakfast was ready and soon I would have to leave my warm spot.

The sun is so powerful that it faded my favorite spot, I was the only person who felt the simplicity by being between the sun and that wood floor, I was connected to both. That part of me melted into the heat of the sun and became solid as the wood floor beneath me.

I became the care take for each of those woody panels that were laid side by side, the Teak was more of a darker color, dark like my body. I cared for it by sparing it with as many bottles of Pledge furniture polish as I could find in the house. I slid up and down those floors with my socks on, pretending to slide into home plate, or across the rock stage of my imagination. Those floors were my foundation for playing with my hot wheels cars, micromachines, and GI-Joes. My Ninja Turtle action figures still find their way journeying across the dark teak terrain hoping that none of the Foot Clan find them.

When I close my eyes when restless, it is that warm floor that my mind drifts to, sinking back into the faded hot teak floor tiles still comforts me and guides me into places within my mind that I have not yet been to.

I am too busy to even notice that the sun hits those floors now, I can only remind myself of how they do, and how much I miss them.