Wednesday

Wednesday something awful happened: it rained. I had been looking forward to being up on the roof all week – as I mentioned in a previous post, I love heights. Sadly, not only are roofs dangerous in the rain, but also, you want the felt dry when you put the waterproof shingles on. Just common sense.

So Wednesday was a day of waiting. It was also Ash Wednesday, and, for me, fasting and waiting at the same time is a challenge. We waited for the rain to slack, then we moved some two-by-fours. (The Hurley men almost eliminated the preposition, calling them “two-b’fours.” I want to adopt this term.) Then we waited for Sonny’s son and the carpenter to come to tell us what to do. When we realized they wouldn’t be in until the afternoon, Phil gave us another task.

Remember how the house is on the side of the mountain, with a “ravine” on one side? Well, when Phil and co. took the tar paper off the ravine side, they used the same strategy we did – they dumped it into the yard. So the side of the mountain was littered with scraps of tar paper. Our job was to throw it across the road and then down the mountainside toward the creek. That would “clean up” the yard.

I scrambled up and down the nearly vertical wall of wet grass and rocks, using a rake to grab bits of tar paper. Marie, Bebe, and Cecil helped from various angles, and they were more diligent than I was about making sure the trash made it across the road. I just enjoyed playing on the mountain. After we had “cleaned,” we found more scraps of thing to burn, more to keep us warm in the dribble than to serve a real purpose.

However, on Wednesday, we spent a good deal of time talking with Phil and Sonny. I love hearing people talk about their lives. We’d chatted some on Tuesday afternoon as the “experts” worked on the roof, and now we had the chance to get to know them even better.

At last, however, Sonny’s son came without the carpenter. We worked with him to figure out how to place beams in the roof of the addition to make hanging insulation and dry wall easier. We proved our collective incompetence with a hammer, but also our enthusiasm, and Sonny’s son very kindly did not judge us.