Rainy Day Woman
“Oh, ho ho,” I chortled into the phone the day before the Nor’easter struck on April 16. “Prepare for a storm? We live in the city. We don’t prepare for storms around here.”
I was speaking to my friend Marguerite, who had called from her woods home in the western Maine mountains after she had finished her preparations and wanted to know if we had done the same.
“We didn’t even lose power during the ice storm,” I bragged. “Only chumps buy into weather hysteria around here.” I then complained about all the people running through Hannaford, buying up batteries and water, getting in my way. “There’s beer in the fridge, and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s precaution enough,” I said, with the self-satisfied air of someone about to stroll to the aft deck to enjoy a band concert – on the Titanic.
Honestly, I am beginning to think I have a direct, open line between my big mouth and the Almighty. Every single time I say something prideful or boastful or snotful, I almost instantly get a Divine Dope Slap upside the head. In this particular case, it came in the form of having our roof blow off in the storm. Not all of it, mind you, and not all at once. Just slowly, gradually, agonizingly, shingle by shingle – so I had plenty of time to eat and digest my words.
Even on the morning of the storm, when I went out to move cars and I noticed a couple shingles on the lawn, I wasn’t worried. I just assumed they’d blown our way from some poor, unfortunate sap’s roof down the street. One of the things our building inspector had stressed before we bought our home three years ago was that the roof was in great shape. John, he and I had even stood out on the street with binoculars examining each shingle. (Actually, John was examining. I was probably staring at the sky or wondering who our neighbors would be or what we were going to have for dinner that night. When you have spent your entire adult life as an apartment dweller, this kind of stuff can bore the crap out of you.)
Ah, but just wait until you become a homeowner. Suddenly things like joists and soffits and storm drains become essential knowledge, replacing heretofore need-to-know downtown concerns like who is you-know-what-ing whom, who is on the ins or outs with whom and, most important, where you can get cheap happy-hour beers to deconstruct it all. Now our spiciest speculation as ‘burb dwellers is who’s going to be manning the plumbing counter – the Old Plumber or the Plumbing Doctor – at Maine Hardware over the weekend. Not that it matters. They both rock.
So, on that stormy Monday I sat at my desk under the back dormer and tried to get something done, but the weather would not have it. The wind screeched. I felt the house shudder and heave like a ship. Sirens wailed. Rain pelted the windows. Then there was a rending sound – something between fabric ripping and wood bending and snapping – and I saw a black wing skate through the air. Except what I saw was no wing. It was a shingle. I stood and looked down at the lawn. Where earlier there had been one or two shingles, now lay a dozen. I donned my rain gear and went outside. The yard was utterly littered with them, and when I looked up I could see the trim line where they were coming from – along the pitch of the roof.
John, who was home from work with a cold, was now up from his sick bed and hauling himself into our attic crawlspace to check for leaks. He was not disappointed. I poked my head up behind him and saw daylight winking back at me – right there, over there, up there. Clearly, this was not good.
He climbed down, and the two of us stood gazing at each other. You know what we both were thinking? “Let’s call the landlord.” And then you know what we both thought? “Let’s call a grown-up.” And then you know what we thought? “We’d better get to work.” (Usually there are more stages of denial when something goes wrong with our house, but on this day there wasn’t time.)
John went to gather tarps, buckets and a hammer and nails, and I hit the phones. I called our insurance company and spoke to a claims representative, who – even that early into the storm; it was still only mid-Monday morning – told me they would be too backed up to send an adjuster over, so they’d be handling our claim over the phone. We were told to photograph and document the damage and then get some repair estimates. Which, of course, led to more phone calls – the first being to our friends Darien and Leyli, who have helped us through house hardships before and who gave us the number of a contractor. (Darien, who called back later to check in on us, said their phone had been ringing off the hook all day with friends looking for advice. She and Leyli had been happy to help. “Today,” Darien said, “everyone in Portland has two lesbian mommies.”)
I then once again donned rain gear to leave a note with a neighbor who had recently had her roof replaced. While out, I saw that a 50- or 60-foot spruce was downed nearby, and had taken a utility pole and lines with it. We never lost power, but later, after a nearby transformer popped and fired like a giant flashbulb three times while I was trying to work, I finally decided it was time to turn off the computer and give myself a storm day.
Except that I’m the type of person who can’t just take a storm day when crisis is afoot. I wanted to do something. I wanted further instructions. I kept going to the radio, but I only heard the day’s news: The storm was leaning in, there were more shootings in Baghdad – or at least that’s what I thought I heard. I wanted to know why they were not reporting my news. Why weren’t they leading with our roof story at the top of every hour?
There is nothing so insular and insulating as a personal calamity. At first, you can only see drips and dislodged shingles. But as you start getting your hands on the problem, your vision and hearing clear. I would soon learn that a leaky roof is small potatoes when compared to the devastation and loss up and down the coast, which would also turn out to be small potatoes when compared with the rest of the news from that mournful day.
But at that point, I didn’t know any of this. Emptying drip pails and watching the sky was all there was to do.
Elizabeth Peavey would like to thank her husband (who looks very cute in a tool belt) for all his heroic tarping and taping and crawl-space and roof climbing. ILYML.
