~/jeffreymoro/posts/2025-07-04-wood

When we bought the house, one half of a two-story duplex in north Baltimore (the stage left half), we thought the floors on the first level were pine. Up the stairs and into the second level ran grey carpet, wall-to-wall. We would have it removed, we said. We didn’t know what was underneath; the inspector suggested generic subfloor and we didn’t know enough to disagree. Homeownership, I have learned, even in its preliminary stages, entails putting your faith in others. So when we bought the house, the floors were pine.

That would turn out, after a fashion, to be untrue. In the first weeks, we brought in a parade of contractors, each with their own styles and preoccupations, to help us understand the work we wanted to do. When we asked one, a very tall man who ran a building company comically out of our price range, if there was any limit to what he could do to our house, he replied that if we wanted, he could move the whole property four inches to the right. Another, an old-timer named Chuck, was a talker, forever showing me photographs of his wife and dog on his phone but avoiding showing me examples of the work he might do on the floors. It was our final choice, a man about my age named Matt, with whom I shared the immediate, unspoken connection of knowing that both of us cared about our chosen profession at a level of detail that others found charming but baffling, who told us that the floors weren’t pine, but rather bamboo. It was also Matt who found, when taking up the carpet upstairs, original hardwood floors, albeit in too poor a condition to be re-used. They would have to come out, he told me. We could install a brand-new plywood subfloor, and then red oak flooring on top of it. The house didn’t have a subfloor, he told me. It was too old for that: it was older than the invention of plywood.

We could have moved in with the house just as it was, but we agreed, in so many words, that we needed to make it ours first. Or rather, that we needed to begin the work of making it ours in certain ways that would have been much harder had we already had our desks, our bed, the piano that I stopped to buy the day I picked up the keys to the house, and our cat all in the mix. And then there was the matter of the house as an investment. We were able, when we bought the house, to have reserved some money to put a bit of work into it. That work, we hoped, would improve the value of the house when it came time to sell it: we might make the money back, and then some. There are things you do to a home because you want to live amongst them, and then there are things you do through the prism of prayed-for profit. This week, while attending to one of the contractors working on the house (this one, a man named Gus, was putting drywall up on the ceiling in our living room to cover up aging tile that had begun to fall down, itself, we discovered, covering up in turn a stippled popcorn ceiling that may or may not have played host to asbestos. Gus is a good guy: he texts me daily to show me his work, which I find uniformly excellent, although I don’t know a thing about drywall), I biked up and down one of my neighborhood’s main drags to explore our local bookstores. At one, famous as the bookstore where filmmaker John Waters receives his fanmail, I buy a copy of Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had. It’s a book about the economy of being a writer: Biss wrote it in the years after she bought her first house. She was thirty-seven at the time, a writing instructor at a university in Chicago. I have just turned thirty-four, and I occupy a similar position at my university in Maryland: on impermanent contracts, but with inertia and faith to take the risk, such as it is, to buy a house. Biss writes about the problem of investment: “Don’t mind me,” she writes, while trimming her hedges, reflecting on how financialized the act of owning a home is, “I’m just tending my assets.” As of this writing, we still haven’t moved into the house yet. That comes in a couple of weeks, now that the work is wrapping up. We haven’t slept a night in it yet. For now, it’s not yet a home, still an asset.

Matt’s team rips the old floor out and puts plywood down. Leveling it takes a miracle, but they pull it off, in part by raising the whole floor a few inches. The walls now appear to slope down into the floor, but we don’t care. The hardwood floors go in: red oak, Quercus rubra. It’s a tree that grows widely across the eastern half of the United States, down to Georgia, where I grew up, and up past Maine to the shores of the St. Lawrence River. Red oak is suited to flooring in part because its grain is quite open, so it takes stain very well. In my corner of media studies, there’s a moderately fashionable approach called “elemental” media studies. This is a method that focuses its attention on the discrete parts that make up media technologies and practices, whether they be classical Aristotelian elements, periodic chemical elements, or elements in a more abstract, conceptual fashion. Yuriko Furuhata writes that while this approach can be useful in providing a philosophical framework upon which to build media theory, it can naturalize assumptions about what is and isn’t an element. For example, she writes, what of wood? In traditional Chinese natural philosophy, there are five elements rather than four, and one of them is wood. And they aren’t really elements in the Aristoleian sense, elements as inviolate building blocks, but rather “phases” through which matter passes. Wood is bound with metal: “earth generates metal while metal subjugates wood.” An endless game of dominance and submission, playing out in the grain of my floors. I think again of the title of Biss’s book, “having and being had.” She never explains it in the book itself (I admire this). But looking on my new floors, which cost me about a fifth of my yearly salary, I can grasp it intuitively. I have the floors; they have me in return. We make a promise to each other: I, that I will care of them; and they, in return, will support me, physically and financially. We are elements of each other’s lives.

We are in July now, in the heat of the year. I’m spending the day in DC and the fireworks already began last night. I expect to spend the rest of the day packing. I hope wherever you are, you are finding yourself supported by the elements of your life. This week, I’ll let Lucinda play us off: