It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall
What happens when the roof fails and the foundation rots (literally)
Last week, on the day of the election, a roofing guy came to our house to inspect it for leaks and determine the best solution for dealing with them.
The week before, I’d noticed some cupping in a small section of boards in our living room floor. I noticed the boards only because I was walking in my socks as I wiped down the room’s baseboards. They are at the end of our couch, close to a wall, so it is a place we don’t usually walk over. What I’m saying is, it’s a bit of a wonder that I discovered the damaged boards at all.
When I said, “Cane, can you come look at this?” everything was dry. We looked for signs of water damage and couldn’t find any. We told ourselves that maybe we just never noticed the cupping before. We told ourselves that maybe there had been something wrong long ago, and the source of the damage had since been fixed. It is an old house, after all, and ours only for the past six years. We can’t know its entire history.
A few days later, a hard rain fell. We almost didn’t hear the dripping, but one of us did, walking past that place. Drip, drip, drip, right onto the cupped boards. We looked up and could see wetness making a path along the seam between ceiling and wall. We could see a crack forming. We pushed at the drywall, and it dimpled.
Up in the attic, Cane found 5 leaks, but only the one was penetrating our living spaces. How long had the roof been leaking? How much damage had it done? Why was it leaking? Could we fix it ourselves? We didn’t know.
Cane bought some stuff to seal around the roof vents, as the main leak seemed to be coming from one, and I wanted that to solve the problem, but I knew it couldn’t, not really. I knew my belief in the roof’s ability to protect us had broken. I no longer trusted the roof. My peace of mind had been breached.
In the fall of 2005, in a different house, with a different husband, I noticed a bump in the floor in front of our dishwasher. I pointed it out to my husband, but we were busy. We were both teachers, living a good distance from our jobs. Our twins were 7, in the thick of all that comes with second grade. It was soccer season, and a looming teachers’ strike was dividing our small, mountain community. Our son had a respiratory ailment that surfaced every fall and resisted every solution our doctor recommended.
We thought maybe there was a problem with the dishwasher. We got someone to come out and check it, but nope; the dishwasher was fine. We didn’t know what it could be.
We ignored the bump. It grew larger, but I didn’t know what to do about it, and I had lessons to plan and baths to give and stories to read and papers to grade and laundry to put away. There were doctor appointments and treatments to try. Allergy tests and discussions of a long series of painful shots. We had tested our home for mold, using a kit that you send away for analysis, but the test result came back negative. I spent a large part of every weekend washing all my children’s bedding and vacuuming and dusting the entire house. I bought special cases for the pillows and mattresses. Our daughter, my son’s twin, also had eczema flares that came with the rainy season.
The strike came, and there we were, with two second-graders to care for and no school to send them to. We entered one-day-at-a-time land. On the first day of the strike, my husband used sick leave to stay home with the kids.
In the morning, he sent me an email telling me that he was going to pull up the vinyl flooring in front of the dishwasher, just to see what he could see. We weren’t crazy about the flooring anyway, he said. Maybe it was a good time to replace it, he said.
It was the first in what became an increasingly alarming series of messages, the last of which told me that when I got home I could go in the house for maybe 15 minutes, to gather whatever the kids and I might need for the foreseeable future. I wouldn’t be able to go back into the house until later; he didn’t know when.
Last week, when the guy came to inspect the roof and its leaks, we talked with him about our options. He told us that he can repair the leaks, but he can’t guarantee that new ones won’t spring within days or weeks. The roof is not at the very end of its life—it still looks good, as a matter of fact, and the home inspection I had done when buying the house indicated that it would last much longer than it apparently is going to—but the shingles are brittle and the nails are coming up, which is allowing the small leaks we’re seeing in the attic.
“The nails aren’t hot-dipped,” he said. “They come from a different era in roofing.” I have no idea what a hot-dipped nail is. “The roof is still functional and you could let it go longer, but it’s nearing end-of-life,” he said.
We realize that a repair would be a stop-gap measure, and we would then need to be vigilant about new leaks. We have concerns about damage the leaks might cause that we cannot see, long-term damage to wood that holds up the roof. The roof guy expressed concern about a beam that shows signs of water.
“I have water trauma in my past,” I said to the roof guy. I made it sound light, like I was making a joke. I wasn’t, though.
What my 2005 husband learned on the long day that began with pulling up the vinyl kitchen flooring is that we had black mold in our home. It was in the kitchen, in a hallway, in our family room, and in a bathroom. Its source was determined to be a hose running under the house that fed water to the refrigerator’s ice-maker. It was a plastic hose, not encased in any kind of impermeable piping. The person who installed the line didn’t properly protect it, and an animal had likely chewed a small hole in it. That hole had created a leak, which allowed the mold to form and spread.
We moved out of our house, to a vacation condo at a nearby golf course. For weeks, we had drying machines running in our home 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In the end, we had to replace the flooring in 1/3 of the lower level of our home. Drywall had to be replaced part-way up the walls of the kitchen and family room. Sub-flooring had to be replaced. All the cabinets had to be removed from the kitchen to make the repairs. We stayed in the condo for six weeks, I think. The teachers’ strike turned out to be the second-longest one in Oregon’s history, and the kids were out of school for more than 4 weeks. We often took them to work with us, and then I would try to get them to do math problems at someone else’s kitchen table after we’d eaten a dinner cooked in someone else’s kitchen.
“Mommy, I don’t want you to be my teacher,” our daughter told me one evening, after I’d failed to adequately explain the concept of borrowing in subtraction. “I want you to just be Mommy.”
It was a hard time, but we managed, as people do. What other choice was there?
We were able to return to the house before Christmas, but our kitchen sink rested on sawhorses for 6 months. Our son’s respiratory problems vanished, and they never returned. Our daughter’s eczema cleared up, too. I thought I had made a safe home for my babies, but I hadn’t. Not even close. It was impossible not to wonder what else I had been terribly wrong about.
The roofing guy last week, the night of the election, told us that a new roof will come with a 50-year guarantee.
“Well,” I said, smiling, “that’s nice, but we sure don’t need one to last that long.”
“What?” he said. “What do you mean?”
I smiled. “Oh,” I said, “I guess we’ll be dead before the new roof gives out.”
He laughed in the way people do when they are startled and uneasy and don’t know what to say. I might have said something to smooth the moment over, but even then, even before we knew what was going to happen later that night, I had become tired of the ways in which we all avoid uncomfortable truths. Cane and I have entered the stage of life where, increasingly, we know that we might be purchasing some things for the last time. It’s unlikely that we, personally, will need anything to last for 50 years now. That’s just a fact, one we are both making peace with.
It can be hard to know the true beginning of something. If I told you that the water leak and all that came with it was the beginning of the end of my previous marriage, it might seem absurd.
It might be absurd; I can trace the fissures in our union back to its very beginnings—can even trace them back to before there was any kind of union at all. But the breaking of it? I could make a case that it began with the water leak and how we each saw and responded to it.
By the time everything in the house was repaired, all evidence of damage erased, the kitchen nicer than it had been before that October day when we finally learned what the bump was all about, the marriage was too far gone to save. Hard things happened during the months of repair and reconstruction, and then more, different hard things happened (a home invasion, a friend’s terminal illness, major surgery, a grandmother’s death). Interpretations of those events and their aftermaths were shaped through a lens created by the water leak.
You know how people lately like to say of great changes that they happen slowly, then all at once? After the bump and the mold and everything that followed them, I became aware of all kinds of leaks in our life. I saw how quickly everything could change if we didn’t repair them, how a person could leave for work one morning and not return to the same home in the evening. We were all fine, in the sense that we were all physically safe, but it does something to you when you are told you have 15 minutes to gather whatever you think you will need and don’t know when (or even if) you might return.
It changes you.
We have one more person coming to inspect the roof and give us an estimate, but we know it will be for replacement, not repair. We are now shopping for the best price for the best service and materials. “We’re buying peace of mind as much as a roof,” I said to Cane. “Repairing will just be kicking the can down the road,” I said. “I want to be good stewards of this house,” I said. “I want it to be solid even when it’s no longer ours.”
It is going to cost a great deal, an expense we, of course, always knew we might have to absorb. Every homeowner takes on the possibility of such major needs, but a theoretical someday feels quite different from a certain today. I’m not sure how it’s going to feel to actually write a check, but not great, I imagine.
We know we’re fortunate that we can pay for it, but it’s going to make a pretty big hole in our financial safety net, and it will take a good while for us to repair it. What else is coming at us, and when? Will we have what we need to take care of ourselves then?
We can never really know, can we?
Last weekend, we happened into a shop that sold nice things. We bought Cane a sweater he’s needed, and me a scarf to replace one that’s become pilly and thin. He tried to talk me into some other things I liked, but I said no, thinking of the roof. Thinking of what we do and don’t know about what resources we’ll have and need.
Leaving the store, I joked, “Maybe I should just buy things now, before the reality of the roof bill kicks in.” It is easy, in this liminal time when the roof is still holding, when we have been getting by with a bucket in the attic, to let ourselves live as if the roof we have now is the one we’ve always had in our minds, the one we counted on. As if our resources are still what they were the day before we understood that the roof would no longer hold, as if we are not going to have to pay more than we ever thought we would, for something we hoped we’d never have to replace. It might have been that way, if the current roof had been a 50-year one, if the nails had been hot-dipped, if we’d been born earlier or later, if we’d chosen a different house, if we’d had different luck.
But we know the time for a new roof is now, and it’s on us to replace it. As for the future, it’s always been a one-day-at-a-time kind of thing. It’s hard to live without illusions of certainty, especially when that’s what you’ve mostly been able to do, but we’ll manage the best we can, as we all do when there’s nothing else to do.
What other choice do we have?
As always, I love to thoughts, stories, wonderings, and ideas in the comments. Please feel free to let me know how this one lands for you.
“As if our resources are still what they were the day before we understood that the roof would no longer hold, as if we are not going to have to pay more than we ever thought we would, for something we hoped we’d never have to replace.”
Thank you thank you for letting me live in the land of sonorous and satisfying metaphor. Jocelyn spoke of bridges in her post this week; I am constructing a footpath through the “ land of one day at a time” using the wise, kind, true words of all my posse’s posts. Your roofs are my bridge.
I am gobsmacked by your fortitude and strength to focus and ability to craft this at this time. So grateful for your a poet heart and simultaneous mile-high/ skeletal vision, your survival skills, and the softness to experience and create in real time for us. As much as I appreciate hearing everyone’s raw truth this week, on a fundamental level, I crave metaphors that sing truth, words that are skeletons for stories of survival—even if they do not end in certainty. I want stories, grim fairy tales, lived, lost, reimagined.
A roof does so much work in life, this essay, but also in story in general— I can’t separate the idea of it from other work we discussed in SCHOOL this week. You have me considering metaphor/ the abstract/ and how they connect in such a powerful and fundamental way. The way when we read something like this it feels TRUE and just meant. Inevitable. The way it resolves an unfinished chord in a cadence we did not know we held in our ears and our breath. That “ a-ha” click we feel in our bones and soul.
In a week when nothing feels like it will ever be resolved and feel that way again, this piece does. So damn satisfying.
We may not see the fifty year life of that new roof, but the decision to pay for it brings its own resolution and satisfaction and the chance to read about it is its own roof for me. Thank you, Rita. For the time and for being here.
Taking a deep breath here. When things go wrong, my youngest daughter goes all Jeopardy and says, "I'll take 'shit show' for 300." That you took these pieces and made such a beautiful essay to share with us, at this moment in our country's history, astonishes me. Thank you.