My Life in Shingles

We have been anticipating the work of a new roof for several weeks. Spring rains have been a beast and prevented much work being done outdoors. A couple of pallets of material have been sitting in my driveway awaiting their purpose in the roofing project. Nothing as dramatic as ‘baited breath” but all await the element of newness and covering it will provide. As a ‘renter’ we were not a part of the decision making process. So as these stacks of material sit in my driveway, I have no idea the color or design that hide beneath their wrapping.

The day it finally begins, naturally, is my day off. The workers arrive around 7am (prompt fellas) and I a bit too eagerly go outside to greet them and offer them coffee. [Yeah, well,  I’ve never been a part of this type of project and I just assumed that’s what I’m supposed to do.] They decline and I’m sure there was a bit of eye rolling as I turned on my pale-blue fuzzy slippers and return inside.

Now, my logical brain fully understood what was about to happen. They would be tearing off all of the old shingles, do some repair work and then place new shingles on the roof. Somewhere between logic and reality is where I tend to reside and this bliss (usually) keeps me content. This day, holy guacamole, bliss it is not.

The workers walk the perimeter of the house getting things moved from harm’s way and laying out their tarps. This is when I discover my family room is pretty much a fish bowl, me looking out, them seeing in. I know they are doing their best to not look in and judge my dirty floors or how desperately I need to vacuum. I wait for them to move to another spot, so that I can close the curtains without being rude. The woven curtains are really glorified sheers, and offer a pitiful amount of coverage. But I at least, feel less obvious.

Loud….Sweet Jesus, it is SO loud. I’m not sure how daintily I imagined they’d be removing the old roof, but this sure-as-shit is louder than I figured. I tried to busy myself, wash dishes – “oh hi, dude right outside the window”, I tried to paint my nails –smearing them as I jump at every overly loud sound. I surrender to just well, surrender my day. While I’m wondering how I will survive this day, it dawns on me; the analogy in this process. This process, is the process of my life.

Like life, damage isn’t always visible. I didn’t seem to notice there was roof damage, inspectors surveyed the roof up-close-and-personal and discovered the damage. Sometimes we keep people at a distance so they don’t see our damage. We think we are doing a good job of keeping up appearances and all the while, something is faulty below the surface. Perhaps it’s something that occurred during a storm or time of trouble in the atmosphere. Perhaps it’s because of a repair-job in the past that wasn’t up to par.

We may have invited the inspector to assess the damage, hoping we can fool them or hope that they’re lousy in their job. We are so incredibly vulnerable up close. Under scrutiny. It’s when they find a chink in our armor, our protection, our covering, our roof; that the real work begins. A crew will arrive and set your world spinning, and it certainly won’t be quiet. We hide behind coverings and partially sheltered windows, keeping our damage, our hurts, hidden from view. But as the discovery crew mingles around our perimeters, they see through the meager sheers. While they may not fully see our damage, they can see our frame, our shadows.

The noise level inside my home is beyond a nuisance or annoying. It’s painful. As a headache begins to pound, I understand more about the daily noise we live with. We busy ourselves with activities and tasks. We hear the clamor of a washing machine or dryer, but it’s familiar. It’s a white noise; almost lulling us into contentment. This racket, geez, it’s unpredictable, unfamiliar and unwelcome. While I know that progress is being made outside of my view; I can’t help but wish them away. I begin to justify myself – it couldn’t be that much damage. They don’t know need to replace the whole roof. Couldn’t they just patch it up?

I’ve become a master of patching-it-up. Patch on a smile or a new hair color, all the while I’m leaking somewhere below the surface. The litany of my shingles that are in disarray are as tall as a ladder going to the top of my 2-story house. I can choose to repair one or two, here and there, but they won’t match. I can replace just the shingles on one section of the house, but the other sides have faulty shingles of their own.

The tarp the crew has laid out to protect the surfaces around my house will also help in the clean-up process. They will soon have the ability to gather up the tarps and discard of the junk easily into the dumpster. However, in the meantime, it is a hot mess of scrap and debris and an overturned garbage can. Much like the debris of my past, it seems to be an overwhelming disaster zone. I can gather it all up and discard it and present the illusion of nothing having been overturned. You know as well as I, no one is ever truly fooled by this swift-swoop-and-chuck routine.

Even as the destruction-construction crew takes a break, I sit in anticipation of their return. I’ve lived many years, with a certain level of nervousness, a palpitation of anxiety in my ears; a vibration that hums below detection or description. It is like the dog whistle who’s pitch is undetectable to human ears, but to a dog, [I’m assuming] it’s torturous.

As predicted, the peacefulness of their lunch break has succumbed to the pounding of a thousand hammers (maybe 6 really). Even as I focus on my own thoughts, my brain wanders. It sits down and protests forming 3 cohesive words. It causes me to wonder the weirdest things, they converse and laugh. A random wohoo seeps through the rafters. I of course, come up with clever conversations and challenges that would evoke a ‘wohoo’, but let’s be honest, they probably just evaded getting pooped on by a bird while atop the 2nd story roof.

The process of remodeling one’s life is likely akin to this roofing process. Damage. Inspection. New material. Destruction. A LOT of noise and mess…but you see, this process is not yet complete! I’m in the middle of it. My home is in the destruction and mess phase. My life is in the understanding of repair needing to be done. Both home and life require core repairs to stop from future damage taking hold. While the new shingles are still under wraps and protected from the elements (and from view), so too is my future. Oh yes, it’s tempting to peak past the packaging to see the new shingle color, but the end result will be so rewarding. Likewise, as each day dawns, I have the opportunity to view it with no wrapping obscuring my eyes. To view each opportunity as a mess and destruction or the reward of a job well done.