My summer vacation, our house, and Josh's Wedding

After Scraping July 15, 2010

In preparation for Josh and Sara's wedding, which was held in our front yard, I embarked on a mission to paint our house. As you can tell from the photo (above) it needed it - even more than I knew. In the finished photo (below) it’s obvious that we have shutters. While standing on the ladder removing the shutters I sidestepped and ducked… twice. Somewhat unsafe but doable for a fifty plus year old man. Why did I do this? Experience! I knew from previous episodes that Bats would flee. Knowing it though still didn’t stop me from being surprised. The brown spot on the back of your pants kind of surprise. Their bat poo poo left an interesting stain on the house too. Great, I thought a stain on my house and my pants. Thank goodness for high pressure water sprayers. But that scare was nothing like my next one.

During their wedding I was sitting in the front row taking in the wonderful moment and incredible view of my son marrying the love of his life. And the house I raised in him in as the backdrop to the whole event. I briefly reminisced about things that happen in this yard with Josh. Things like catching a baseball with him, playing hide and seek, funny things Josh did and some I did to him. One time I gave him old cough syrup that had exceeded its expiration date. To make matters worse Sue had already, unknowingly to me, given him the correct medicine. Later that night after we were all asleep, Sue woke me up to tell me that she believed that someone was running around our house and was disturbed about it. You guessed it, I was shocked to look out our back door window to see Josh panting and sweating. He could not even explain how he got outside let alone why he was running around our house at 3am. But I kind of knew.

Two seconds later my thoughts turned to the dumbest thing I’ve done. And it occurred just weeks before. The roof that you can see in the photo doesn’t look that steep. I thought so too. If you enlarge the top photo and look at the top right of the roof our chimney top sits about 40 feet off the ground. It had never been painted and showed a hundred years of coal and dirt. Since this would have been somewhat noticeable during the wedding ceremony I decided to paint the backside of chimney. I placed our tallest ladder against our roof just to the right of the front porch. Josh joined me to help, just in case something bad might happen. I’m not completely dumb.

I crawled off the ladder onto the roof with a paint brush and caulking gun in one hand and my paint sprayer gun connected to a fifty foot hose filled with paint in the other. After painfully crawling half way up the roof I started to slide backwards. Josh’s concern was evident in his voice as he called to me come back. Well I was kind of falling back anyway and in one sense his request appealed to me but my other senses were screaming no. I can’t explain but to go backwards was to go blind. Due to the position of my body and slant of the roof I could not turn to see where I was going. I let my full body hug the roof and tried to shimmy up. It seemed that for every inch I was able to move up I slid back the same. I almost panicked. But, believe it or not, I remembered the counsel of my ninth grade health teacher telling us to never panic and keep your senses about you. I didn’t let myself panic but I felt a full fledged conundrum, a catch 22 situation. I couldn't go up and I can’t go back. I know I know you must be thinking that by now I must have discarded my three tools. Nope!

Ignoring Josh’s plea’s I used every bit of my strength and tugged, crept, and scratched inch by inch, with my tools and made it to the top.  I painted the chimney.  Physically shaking, exhausted, bearing burns and scrapes on my arms and legs from the shingles, but I did it. Dumb but alive and sitting watching my son… my son marry his love…my new daughter.  In some respects my trip up the roof was kind of like my years of parenting.  We do it without a net.  God is indeed good.