Ask Athena: How Do You Prevent Marble Staining?

QUESTION: “Athena, how do you prevent marble staining.”
ANSWER: “I don’t!”

Here is my philosophy: Let your marble become a metaphor for life. To further outline my attitude to marble staining, I want to share a little story from my past (pre-EyeSwoon) that helped me make this imperfect shift.

Twenty years ago I studied method acting. Part of my studies was taking a Jungian dream interpretation workshop (our dreams are creative products of the psyche after all). Here’s how it goes… directly before going to sleep you ask your inner self to revel in a dream and ask what it is that you need to work on? A notebook is placed at your bedside so that the second your eyes open you can start writing down your dream. Mine was profound. Here’s how it went:

I was about to have a dinner party in my DUMBO loft. I was deep in the creative process of preparing the table, the flowers, the food (EyeSwoon didn’t even exist at the time!) but there was an oversized Ogre wearing unfastened overalls jumping around the house screaming “sticky stuff, sticky stuff, sticky stuff” and dripping, well, sticky stuff, all over the floors. I was frantically chasing him for what felt like hours until I successfully pushed him out the door, just before my friends arrived.

When I woke up, I was oh-so-proud and couldn’t wait to share my dream. I recounted every detail of the dream for the class and my teacher, although amused they all seemed a little bit sad as I boasted about how I got rid of my messy friend. My pride quickly deflated when Jennifer shared, “Athena, that Ogre is you. He represents the messy side of your personality. Sure, you wanted everything perfect but life, real life, is imperfect, messy, and sticky at times and you must embrace all facets of yourself.”

This brings me to my point: marble is a natural material and that is precisely why it is so damn beautiful, perfect in all of its flaws and imperfections. So yes, get real marble, and don’t be afraid to cook on it, spill on it, have ring marks, and lemon stains because that is simply the sign of life in your kitchen. And truthfully, you only see them if you look at a specific angle with just the right light hitting the stone.

The moral of the story is this: You choose what you want to focus on, the beauty or the mess. But really, it’s always a little bit of both!