Inside the box, packed in newspaper from 1971, were tiles. Two hundred of them, maybe more. Each one hand painted. Blue morning glories curling around the edges, and in the middle of every single tile, a different small bird. Cardinals, wrens, a blue jay, a chickadee. No two the same.
On top was a note on a recipe card. It said, for the next floor, whenever it comes. I could not bear to walk on them. You go ahead. Love, Margaret.
I called the couple up from the kitchen. Laura and Dave had bought the house in February. They knew it had been owned for fifty years by an old woman who taught art at the high school. That was all they knew.
Laura picked up one tile, a little wren, and turned it over. On the back, scratched into the clay before it was fired, were initials and a date. M. H. 1970.
She painted two hundred birds for a floor she never let herself stand on.
Dave went next door and asked the neighbor, an older man named Carl who had lived on that street since the sixties. Carl knew the whole story.
Margaret Hollis had been an art teacher at Parkersburg South for thirty four years. In 1970, she painted those tiles for this bathroom, one bird a night for most of a year. She had them fired at the college kiln. Then her husband took sick that winter, and she could not afford the tile setter, and by the time she could, she said they were too pretty to put under the feet of anybody. So she boxed them up and had the old floor laid over them.
Carl said she used to tell her students that art does not always have to be looked at. Sometimes it just has to exist.
Margaret passed in 2017. She had no children. But Carl said she had about four thousand students over the years, and every one of them remembered her.
Laura looked at me. She asked if I could set them.
I said I could set anything. It was just a question of whether she wanted to walk on them.
She said Margaret told her to.
It took me two weeks. I set every one of those tiles in a pattern Laura laid out on the kitchen table, with the cardinals in the center under the window where the morning light comes in. I did the grout myself, by hand. I have never been so careful with a floor in my life.
When it was done, Laura posted a photo on the local community page with the story. By the next morning, it had been shared nine hundred times. Former students were leaving comments all night. One woman said Margaret gave her a paintbrush the day her father died and told her to paint instead of talk.
That woman is an art teacher now at the same high school.
Laura invited her over. She stood in the doorway of that bathroom and cried.
Twenty years I have been setting tile. That is the only floor I ever set that I wanted to sign.