Lost My Marbles

I have a terrible secret that I've been hiding from you.  Ready?

I've planned all along to use marble countertops in my kitchen.

I've likely left you shrieking in horror, I know.  Marble in a kitchen will STAIN!  It will ETCH with even the tiniest bit of acid exposure!  I'll have to forswear red wine forever!

So, I probably haven't actually left YOU horrified, I know, but there are plenty of folks on the internet with a serious case of the vapors at the mere mention of the teeniest thought of marble in a kitchen, for the above reasons.  I've read them all at this point, I think, and I still want marble countertops in my kitchen.  I'm clearly a madwoman.

I'm also a woman who wants a beautiful home, and folks, marble is achingly lovely.

Look at this and try not to cry at how pretty it is.

Here's what I think:  I use my kitchen, a lot, and marble seems delicate in some ways, but it's very durable, and apocryphally useful for a lady who likes to bake.  More than that, it's so classic--you can't get more classic, really, than the stuff Augustus Caesar used to renovate his capital.  I do love to emulate the Caesars, you know.  And because it's classic, all that stuff about etching and staining shouldn't really bother me.  If you walk through the Forum Romanum, all that marble on walls and floors and pillars and statues is etched by roughly a zillion years of rain and dust, and, let's be real, wine and blood and pee.  And not one bit of all of that goop mars for an instant the beauty of the stone that the Greeks called the "shining stone."  I think from this starting point, marble ends up being a very reasonable choice for someone who hopes her house will be her home forever.

So I spent the past week or so driving around to various stone places, looking at their slabs of marble, trying to figure out what the different kinds of marble are, and begging someone, anyone, to give me even a ballpark figure for what a piece of stone costs.  These stone guys, they aren't telling.  They don't even like to give prices to my contractor.  It's like a grown-up game of telephone--the salesperson can have their ordering manager call my contractor's fabricator, to whom they MIGHT indicate a price-per-square-foot.  That's not an exaggeration, that's just the actual facts.  It's silly, and infuriating, and given that it was finally Houston Hot this week and I had to drive pretty much out to Saturn to get to these places, I'm glad to tell you I picked a slab.  But how to choose?

These are some slabs of Carrarra marble.  This is the stuff that's been used for years, and I think it's still pretty darn lovely, but what they're quarrying now has much more grey in it than white, and that's not as in-demand, so it's also significantly less expensive than the others.  Pretty and pretty cheap--sounds good, right?

But then there's these pretties--the popular choice, and the priciest--Calacatta.  They're also from Italy, like the Carrarra (though a different place?), but they still have more white in them and have the "cloudy" patterns and movements in them that people are into.  That top one is Calacatta Oro, and is known for having golden or copper streaks in it, and the bottom was called Calacatta Luna.  I still don't know if that's a real thing or just a name that particular warehouse was using to charge an unknown but huge amount of money.  It looks like fluffy clouds, and I like it.  It's so pretty.

And this stuff, like the one at the top, is called statuary (or Statuario, if they're trying to charge you more money by convincing you it's extra fancy and reminding you it's from Italy).  The Internet has not really been successful in explaining to me exactly what Statuary marble is, but I gather it's from Carrarra but its more white and has little grey lines in it and it's somehow what sculptors have always used.  It's like having your own wee bit of Michaelangelo in your kitchen.

So picture me:  I'm driving out to edges of Houston that feel as far away as the rings of Saturn several days in a row, wandering through giant, un-airconditioned warehouses when it's about 100 degrees outside, looking at roughly 752 slabs of white and grey stone that probably cost a lot though I don't know how much, thinking, "Pretty.  Pretty.  Pretty."  And I took about a million pictures of different slabs, and when I got home I couldn't tell them apart.  And my contractor's designer emailed me pictures of more slabs.  I knew it was time for me to make a decision, and I didn't think I had the information I needed to make a decision, and if I chose wrong it would be something I had to live with until they bury me in my backyard, hopefully many, many years from now.  I just kept thinking about how they're all so darn pretty.

And that's how I decided, I guess.  I went back to the one place where they'd tell me a price, that conveniently was also the one place not located on Neptune's smallest moon, and I picked two slabs (one of them is that pretty guy at the top!) because they were pretty.  They put stickers on them with my name, and some day soon, I reckon, those slabs will show up, cut to size and honed, in my house.  And they'll look spectacular.  I had a couple of anxiety dreams about picking wrong, but in the end they're all pretty, and that's the point, isn't it?  I don't think I COULD choose wrong.  It's possible Augustus marked every stone he used to clad his new-old city with a sticker, but it's more likely he just decided, "Let's go with marble," and called it a day, and that's good enough for me, too.