Embracing the Wonk

My kitchen floor is a disaster right now. New subfloor replacing the old, rotten one and retro checkerboard tile going in — the appliances are still homeless under a tarp on the patio— and already I can see cracks in the new tile, a chip here, a gap there. My first instinct was to be annoyed at the workmen. But honestly? They did their best. The truth is, my house is over a hundred years old, and it was built from a Sears kit and has never had a single 90-degree angle in its life. It has settled and shifted and shrugged its way into its own particular shape for a century, and no amount of careful tile work is going to argue it back into a grid.

So, I've decided to call it "embracing the wonk." The floor is going to be a little uneven no matter what anyone does, because the house it's in is a little uneven. That's not a flaw to be corrected — it's just what a hundred years looks like.

I think that's true of us, too, isn't it? There's no serum that makes a woman look pristine again. Most cosmetic procedures don't make us look flawless — they make us look different. And chasing youth is a fight we were never going to win anyway, because the years actually happened. They're not mistakes to be sanded out.

What if we let beauty mean something bigger instead? Experience. Wisdom. The particular character that only comes from having lived through things. A house that's still standing after a hundred years of Tennessee summers isn't diminished by its wonky corners — it's distinguished by them. They're proof it survived, and settled, and is still here, still useful, still beautiful.

Maybe that's the real definition of beauty we ought to be reaching for — not flawless, but faithful. Not smooth, but sturdy. Still standing, checkerboard cracks and all.