Entry #32
January 16, 2024 — 10:15 PM
Dusk held on longer than it should have. The parlor had that winter dim where edges stay visible but color drains out. I left the work light off to keep the room honest and went back to the two brass tacks I set in the baseboards on Monday—the southeast corner behind the cold radiator, the northwest corner near the fireplace return. I had logged the diagonal between them then. A straight cross-reference to see how square the room really is.
The tape measure felt colder than the floor. I hooked the blade on the southeast tack, drew it up and across. The blade’s edge hissed over old varnish. I put my thumbnail on the north end to hold it flat at the head of the tack. I read the inch mark I wrote in the notebook two days ago, then the one the tape was giving me now. It wasn’t the same. Not by much, but not by the kind of slop you forgive in a house this age.
I checked the hook. I always do. The little float in the rivets is there by design to account for inside and outside measures. I loaded it gently to the outside of the tack head, then did it again using the one-inch mark to eliminate the hook entirely—started at 1, ended at the reading plus an inch. Same result. I shifted my stance to keep the pull perfectly in line with the centers of the tack heads so I wasn’t biasing it. I even laid a chalk line light across the floor to make sure I was keeping a true path. The line matched the tape path. The number didn’t move.
Three-sixteenths longer than Monday.
I flipped the tape end-for-end and did it all again. No hook this time either—1 inch to the opposite tack, reading off the mark at my thumb. I watched parallax, bent low so my eye sat right on the blade. My headlamp made a small white pool on the brass. No tremor in my hand that I could feel. Same number. I took the level to the baseboards to see if one had walked out, but the bubble behaved the way it did yesterday—touching the line I penciled behind the radiator. If anything had bowed, it did it in a way that kept the board level to itself and changed the space between them.
It’s colder now than it was on Monday by a couple of degrees. Dry heat’s been on less today. If the wood moved, I would expect it to shrink. Shrinkage doesn’t add distance across a room like this without giving it back somewhere I can see. Floorboards creak, yes, but there were no new gaps, no proud nails. Just a different number between the same two points.
Near the northwest tack, under a scuff in the varnish, there’s an old scratch I noticed when I set the point: E. B., shallow and done with something sharp. I put my thumb over it, as if I could press the room back into itself. The scratch stayed the same. The tape didn’t.
I went back to the notebook. Either I mis-measured twice with the same care, or the room took three-sixteenths while I wasn’t looking. I don’t like either answer, and I don’t get to pick a third. I wrote down the new diagonal. I circled it. Then I wrote it again beneath the first, the same neat figures, as if repetition could make it ordinary.
— Thomas Hale