Saturday, October 24, 2020

Summer's last hurrah?

Friday was supposed to be a very nice day, in the 70s and sunny.  Soooo....it was a perfect day to shingle the garage. 

Tim took the day off, because 'we don't know if we'll have any more days like this before winter hits.'

My sister came across the road to help and we spent the day working hard and laughing in the sun. The sky was a brilliant blue. Just a perfect day. We remarked through the day how wonderful it was to have just one more day like this. 

I have a wonky knee, one that is prone to give way without warning when I'm not standing on level ground. That rules out standing on a pitched roof.  I was the designated shingle cutter. Tim and Anna were up on the roof. I went up and down the ladder with cut shingles. Anna brought the tractor up with the front tines on so that we could lift two pallets of shingles to the roof. Incredibly time and labor saving, not having to haul bundles of shingles up a ladder. 

Between the three of us, we got the job probably 3/4 of the way done before my brother in law got home from work. He had kindly made a side trip for us to pick up another piece of drip edge.

Tim has a very bad habit of carefully figuring just how much of everything he needs. He was about 4 feet short on the drip edge. Further more, to be perfectly honest, we were not sure until the very last 10 minutes whether we even had enough shingles to complete the job or not. For the 100th time of our marriage, I said, "Why can't you just buy extra? If we don't use it, we can always take it back!" But he answered just like he always does. "We'll be fine." 

My nephew and his daughter stopped in and he is a jokester. A good dollop of nonsense really makes a job go easier. Time flew and the shingles went down, and Tim followed along with the air nailer.

Finally, we were done. There was not a shingle to spare. Five damaged shingles were cut to make end pieces and we were lucky we had them, or we'd have been short.

The wind was picking up a bit. My nephew headed to his house. My brother in law drove their tractor home. My sister and her granddaughter helped us gather up the scrap wood and shingle wrappers and the rest of the construction rubble and we started a fire. Then they too were off and it was just Tim and I once again. 

We were both tired. We had an odd supper of leftovers, spicy black bean soup, microwave quiche, naan washed down with ice water, watching night fall. The wind got a bit wilder, but it was still warm.  We could see distant lightning in the dark sky and hear the grumbles of thunder. I love thunder and lightning storms and this looked like it was going to be a dandy. 

We sprawled lazily, Tim in his rocking chair so that he could watch for deer, me on the couch. We watched Green Book which we both enjoyed. When the movie was done, I washed the dishes up and put things to rights. 

Tim said, "I'm beat. I'm headed to bed." 

But I could see distant lightning in the dark sky and hear the grumbles of thunder. The storm moving in looked like it was going to be a dandy and I couldn't bring myself to miss it. I shut off the lights and sat in the dark in Tim's comfortable chair watching the storm move in through the west facing screen door. The wind blew my night gown and ruffled my hair. 

The rain came in, and the storm blew over like all storms do and I fell asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof.

Late Edit: I am so glad that I took the time to savor that breeze last night. Today it has been cold and drizzly and gray. 

1 comment:

I'm glad you're here!

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