Finished with the Roof and Safe on the Ground

Fixing the roof started last year. We had glorious intentions of finishing before winter. Do you realize how much snow we got last November? I do. I had to go up on the roof and shovel it off so we could keep working up there. We finished the more difficult side of the roof around the snow, and we told ourselves we would come back for round two when the weather got nice again.

By the time I got back up on the roof this summer (there were a few other projects… there are always a few other projects), I was racing to see if I could finish the roof before I became a father. Unsurprisingly, Eliza Joyce Hust arrived before the roof was completed. Let me tell you, Eliza is more beautiful than the roof, and that is saying something because that roof is a sight for my weary eyes to see.

When I look at that roof, my chief emotion is relief that it is done. That is one of the few store projects that we even thought about hiring someone else to do. But when you can save about $5000 if you do something yourself, you suddenly find yourself doing things that you don’t necessarily feel comfortable with.

I spent a lot of time on that roof, and I didn’t fall… until the very end. I was at the peak finishing the spot where the last of the trim all came together, and I was so determined to finish that very night that I worked until the roof was covered in dew. Whoops! I was thirty feet off the ground and the only way down was a wet metal slide with a ten foot drop-off to the ground at the bottom.

Dad offered to attach a rope to the truck and lower me down gradually with it, but I declined for two reasons. One, I wanted off that roof pronto. I didn’t want to wait for all that to go down. In retrospect, it would have added five minutes, but I had been looking forward to being done and off the roof for months. Five minutes was too long. Two, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could work my way down if I clung desperately to the tops of the roofing screws.

I courageously tried to get my foot on a screw head, and I let go. Immediately I knew that I had made the wrong decision. Eyes wide with terror, I picked up speed at an alarming rate as I watched the drill, which had unhooked itself from my belt, careen ahead of me and over the precipice. I looked at my father. He looked at me. Then I was airborne.

It is remarkable how much can go through one’s mind in such a short time. Above all, I watched in my mind a commercial from years ago where a man pushes an old woman out of a train after he tells her, “You want to hit the ground rolling!”

My father thought briefly about trying to aid me, but quickly opted to sidestep me as I flew towards him. I’m glad he did. That would have hurt had he tried to catch me. As I first began to hit the ground, I let my momentum carry me into a forward roll. I popped deftly onto my feet as I declared that no one was going to make me go back up there.

Of course, Gramps had been coming out to see the progress when all of this happened. He got to witness the whole thing, and he thought it was just about the most entertaining thing he had seen all year. That’s good. After all, one of my primary jobs on the Hust Roost is to keep Grandpa entertained. Mission accomplished. Oh, and the roof was done, too.