Tree House
St Louis, MO
March 12, 2018
I have a younger brother who last week climbed another rung on the ladder of middle-age, and an older son who last month progressed to within a year of what our legal arbiters define as “adulthood.”
Of course, the one might claim he is not so far up the ladder as I presume, while the other no doubt considers himself to have progressed much further than I suppose.
Be that as it may, the grains of time gather in the upper half of the hour-glass and, like the mob at the Bastille, are pressing anxiously at the neck.
While that process often reflects itself in such accelerating decrepitude and senility as seems to frequently burden your correspondent (as his hapless readers will attest), it is also manifest in more pleasant fashion when we round life’s turns to discover such joys as baby Isla arriving anew to beautify the family landscape.
As the wheel revolves, we seek solace from Virgil:
Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile remous, singula dum capti circum vectamur amore (But meanwhile time flies, flies irreparably, while we, charmed with love, linger around each detail).
One detail that flowed to our attention a while back, neither conveying nor eliciting love, was a persistent puddle in our garage.
A man’s home is his hassle…and also, from time to time, his reflection (or harbinger).
Peeling paint evokes his wrinkling or discoloring skin; fading or falling shingles reflect his greying and thinning hair; bugs infest the structure as bugs infect his organs; and creaking walls and groaning floors elicit sympathy from his back and hips.
We can only hope the leak in our garage was not a portent of coming bodily attractions.
The corner from which the water derived is five feet above ground level, with no obvious exterior basin from which it could mount its stealth assault.
My credentials as an electrician became woefully apparent at a circuit breaker in Michigan last year. Likewise, whatever aptitude I may possess for detecting and correcting improper circulation of water thru a house remains glaringly inconspicuous.
As such, several specialists were beckoned to diagnose the source of the unwanted stream.
The plumber confirmed that neither the room above nor walls around harbored even a single water pipe.
Recent low temperatures and lack humidity would seem to eliminate as a suspect the condensation pipes from the air conditioner, the only other suspect with means or motive.
Regardless, our HVAC guy recommended surgery on the offending corner of the garage ceiling, hoping to inspect for damaged or blocked PVC.
After the initial incision, his flashlight shone into the opening.
“Oh my God!”
“Uh…Excuse me?”
“I have never seen anything like this before.”
“Like…what?”
“Wow!”
“Should I sit down?”
“You have a tree growing in your house.”
“Huh?”
“Hold on…”
As he scampered down the ladder and to the exterior of the house, both eyes, and then both arms, shot skyward with the exultation of Lewis and Clark sighting the Pacific.
“Yes! There it is!”
Yes, there it was…
…protruding through the back corner of the roof like a disfigured mast that once flew the Lone Star over the Alamo.
A large branch, spun like PayPal from eBay off some distant pine tree, had pierced our roof in the manner of Chief Osceola at midfield.
We have no pine trees within a hundred yards of our house, and the force necessary for that limb to penetrate several feet beneath the roof would seem to have required high wind and great distance.
I have no idea the source of the stump, or how long it had been there, but am relieved that it arrived from above rather than from beneath the house. The splinter was removed and the wound patched.
The joys of home ownership never cease, but I was very pleased to have discovered the source and solution to another in a parade of issues that eventually afflict any abode.
Smugly satisfied by my newly sealed and dried garage, I prepared to leave it, ready to overcome whatever challenges the day cast across the path of one so competent as to recognize his crackerjack ineptitude, and that he should call others to help overcome it.
With the pride of Custer on the plains, head high, chest out, arrogant smirk firmly ensconced, I proceeded confidently from the house to the car…
…which wouldn’t start.
JD
