I recently started smoking again. That was a brilliant move on my part. It’s okay to congratulate me. Go ahead. I feel like a newcomer at an AA meeting admitting my dirty little secret. I used to smoke in college, back when Joe Camel was a sex symbol wearing a Speedo draped across print ads. We thought he was sexy with his swollen abs and massive humps. I have to hand it to advertisers who can make girls lust over a dusty, spitting desert mammal used for transportation purposes. I successfully kicked the habit upon growing up and entering the real world.
I didn’t start back because I was stressed out, or because of great sex, or even to lose weight. I did it to preserve the appearance of my kitchen table … because in case you didn’t know, nicotine is better for wood than Murphy’s Oil Soap or Pledge. It’s a little secret that the government is trying to keep you from finding out. Yeah, they preach cancer, emphysema, and heart disease, but they don’t tell you about the heavenly shine that cigarette ashes properly applied can bring out in your wood furniture. So, here’s how it happened, and let me tell you, I’m not proud if this. But for some things, like furniture refinishing, you have to make sacrifices and rearrange your priorities. I have this beautiful antique farm table. Don’t be jealous. I’m not bragging. It’s the only piece of furniture I own that didn’t come from Big Lots or a garage sale, or a garage sale of Big Lots furniture. Oh, I also have a couch set that came from Bargain Kuntry Furniture Liquidators. This store had twenty-seven going-out-of-business sales, before it actually WENT out of business. I guess they cried wolf one too many times and people didn’t buy it. (Pun intended) Anyway, this farm table is made from some gorgeous, exotic wood from a tree that’s probably now extinct.
My gorgeous table of such rare wood doesn’t seem to hold up to anything. You can’t set anything down on it that’s too hot, cold, wet, spicy, or made with Spam as the main ingredient. If you even breathe too hard, it’ll dull the finish.
But, the biggest problem of all was white spots. Have you ever had a white ring on a table? Yeah, they’re hard to remove. So, one day, my son Andrew came in from swimming and threw his pool towel down on the table. As soon as I came in, saw the towel that was almost dry, and yanked it down, there was a huge white spot hovering right in the center, where the main dish would sit, if I ever cooked. I’m talking about a fluffy cumulous cloud that had settled into the wood grain, unpacked its bags and was lounging with a margarita and the channel changer. It wasn’t going ANYWHERE. No flower arrangement or placemat could cover it. It looked like one of those splotches picked up by Ghost Hunters EVP. I pulled out the oil soap and the scratch cover and the whole nine yards. Nothing touched it. So, being a pretty resourceful gal, I decided I was NOT going to be defeated by this wood grain stain.
I got in my car, headed to the library and set up shop in the wood furniture resource section. After thumbing through thirty-three books, written by sixty-something-year-old men wearing flannel shirts and thick plastic rimmed glasses from the early eighties, I found the right book. Why is it that we trust men wearing flannel to know a thing or two about do it yourself projects? As if every wood working apprentice learns the dress code early by their mentor reprimanding them, “Son, you cain’t sand that coffee table wearing a cotton t-shirt! Get your flannel on, boy. Take pride in your work!”
I chose a book that has an entire chapter dedicated to cleaning tough white spots out of wood. Shockingly enough, it said that the best remedy is to mix cigarette ashes with vegetable oil or mayonnaise. Not fireplace ashes, or cremation ashes, or burnt sacrifice ashes or burn the evidence ashes. Cigarette ashes! I had to read it twice to make sure I wasn’t just having nicotine-induced delusions revisited from fifteen years ago. But, it was right there in black and white, cigarette ashes made into a paste with vegetable oil, and an adequate amount of scrubbing would remove the stain. You wouldn’t want to use it in your deviled eggs or cole slaw, but for white stains, it was the perfect recipe.
