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At some point in every training conversation, someone asks about touching. Can you touch it with your hands? What does it feel like? The questions come from a genuine place — I understand the impulse — but they miss something about how the work actually goes.

There are rules, and there are reasons for the rules, and then there is the thing underneath both of those which I'm not sure I can explain cleanly. You wear gloves, or you don't touch at all, depending on the material and what you're doing. You move slowly. You think about where your weight is. You consider the angle. None of this is ceremony — it's mechanics, it's conservation practice, it's what keeps the object from deteriorating further under your hands.

But there is a moment, sometimes, when I'm working close enough to a surface that I can feel the temperature change — the slight coolness coming off old ground, the way a cracked layer of paint shifts the air just above it — and I think about the last hands that touched this. Four hundred years ago, or five hundred. Someone doing exactly what I'm doing, but in the other direction: putting something down rather than trying to keep it there.

I don't touch more than I have to. Not because of the rules. Because of that.

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