“I see you up there,”I shouted. “Don’t think I don’t see you.”
I was staring up at the ceiling. In the middle of the night. Pointing. POINTING! I must have looked like a madman. Luckily everyone else in the house had gone to sleep. Not even the dog was up to worry about me … my sanity. The dog would have had me hauled off to the loony farm. She can dial a phone.
But I wasn’t crazy. I saw it. A glimmer. A peak. A little spot. A tiny trickle. A drip. Yes, a drip.
The leak was back.
It had been so long since I had seen it. All winter. All summer. Back to last spring, and maybe earlier. In some ways it was like seeing an old friend — reassuring and comforting — until you remember the last time you saw this particular individual he drank all your beer, insulted your wife, turned your house upside down and ultimately relieved himself on your living room floor.
Outside the rain was coming down like wet towels. Whump! Whump! Whump! It seemed to slap the earth in waves. Like poured from a bucket, only it didn’t end. Just pounding.
The slumbering leak woke up with a yawn and sprang to life. “Hello drywall.”
I had no one to blame but myself. A new roof is coming — after the addition is complete. It makes sense that way. What doesn’t make sense is when you know you have a problem area in your roof, namely a misbehaving gully. When you know heavy rains are coming. And when you know enough pollen, mash, leaves and other assorted bits of daily detritus have accumulated like a beaver dam in the gully. That it’s thick and has glued itself together, ensuring that at the first good rain it will send streams of burrowing water down through the roof like ants after sugar.
You damn well knew it! And now the rains are here and you’re staring up at the ceiling cursing everything but yourself. “This is all thanks to AIG and the recession. Stickin’ it to me!”
You knew that gully. That it could leak even when it’s not raining. In a drought. Just from the humidity, sucked in through little cracks and next thing you know there’s a drip. So you have no excuse.
Why didn’t you clean out the gully?
All of this I demanded of myself as I stared up at the drip. Lucky for me, in spite of the downpour and the Hoover dam that erected itself atop my roof, it wasn’t all that bad. So here it was midnight and I was pondering whether to go outside, lean a ladder up against the roof and remove that heap of compost. The great gully jam.
I’ve done before at night. It’s never a fun experience, and terribly frightens the wife.
“Where in the world do you think you’re going?” she asks horrified. I always look like some kind of sad New England fisherman with a wilted blue raincoat and boots. “Oh, you know, off kill to myself in some unglorious way.”
“You can’t go out in this weather,” she further informs me, always adding the obvious, “Don’t you know it’s raining?”
I look up at the leak — it laughs at me. “Yes, honey, I think I know that.”
As I climb the ladder, I always think of all the ways I can die on such an expedition. It’s not like swimming with sharks. You know how you’ll meet your end that way. Or race car driving. But this leaves open so many possibilities. Climbing a sopping wet ladder up to the roof of your house at night in a driving rainstorm with lightning all about and a rake in your hand to scrape the leaves out that might be the home to a rabid squirrel or some kind of flesh-eating bacteria. Oh, there are thousands of exotic ways you could meet your maker like this. Even simultaneously.
I stared up at the leak, thinking about that last trip up the ladder. Suddenly he didn’t look like such a bad leak — too mean a fella’. Kind of quaint and nice like that old friend.
So I put a bucket under him, told him to turn out the lights when he was done, and left him alone with all my beer.