I grew up in Guyana in a little village on the West Coast, and I remember clearly the first time I saw a waxed greenheart floor. It was in one of those beautiful two-storey houses lining Lamaha Street in the big city. I don’t remember how I came to be in that opulent place, but I remember to this day the sight of that gleaming hardwood. I had never seen anything like that. I just stood there staring at it.
It was an image that stayed with me in the time I lived away – reinforced again on my frequent trips to Guyana over the years – and when I moved back to the Caribbean in 1982 and built my dream home in the Cayman Islands, while there was a lot of Guyana in that yard (starapple and breadnut and whitey), the clincher was that I was able to put in greenheart floors in the house. I did it by myself: the cutting, the clamping, the toe-nailing, the sanding, and the polyurethane finish (four coats of that) but it was worth every hour of that long solitary labour. For the rest of my life in Cayman, a day didn’t go by without my noticing or appreciating my shiny greenheart floor, and that’s no exaggeration – every day. Often visitors would marvel over it, which of course only added to my pleasure.
There are scenarios in your life like that, not truly
