If we’re Facebook friends, you’ve already seen pictures of the large section of the stately silver maple tree in our back yard that fell on our house a week ago Sunday, and read updates about the leak in the kitchen ceiling and initial encounters with roofers. But I’m going to start at the beginning. I hear it’s a very good place to start.
Before the Tree Fell On the House
It was a thunderstorm with high winds that felled about a quarter of the tree. Like most summer (and late spring) thunderstorms, it was preceded by a stretch of hot, muggy weather. It started Friday morning and lasted until late Sunday afternoon.
On Saturday the kids and I cleaned the porch, which is an annual chore involving bathing suits, a hose, and buckets of water. We do it this time of year because the pollen that’s usually thick on every surface has basically finished falling by this point. We lugged all the furniture, recycling bins, ladders, etc. off the porch, cleaned the floor and the tops of the walls, then scrubbed all the stuff on the lawn and hauled it back up. Noah provided music, including a rather startling remake of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” with a techno beat.
It wouldn’t be a porch clean if Noah didn’t spray North with the hose or pour a bucket of water over their head (with their consent, of course) so that happened, too. We don’t always put soap in the buckets of water but we did this year and now that the porch floor is painted pale green rather than a sort of cross between gray and olive green, this makes a big difference. I was impressed with how much cleaner it looked when we were done.
When the Tree Fell on the House
The next afternoon we were all doing our own thing. Noah had a temp job operating a boom for Mike, a local filmmaker who sometimes has work for him. Mike was filming a documentary and they were in a church recording someone giving a speech about climate change. Noah was filling in for a member of the crew who had covid. North was taking a nap. Beth was working on a financial aid form for Noah’s senior year. I was out on the newly clean porch reading The Picture of Dorian Gray and watching a thunderstorm roll in. It got dark, rain started to fall, unusually high winds kicked up, and then there was an extremely loud crash from somewhere behind the house. I had no idea what it was, but I went inside and Beth told me before I could see. I got an umbrella and went out to the back yard to investigate.
Because the tree was covering the roof, it was hard to see exactly where the damage was, but soon water was pouring in through the kitchen light fixture, and dripping down the wall and onto the stove, so over the kitchen was a safe guess. Fortunately, no other rooms in the house were affected. Beth sprang into action searching online for emergency roofers and making inquiries on the neighborhood listserv and I texted a friend whose house sustained roof damage during a hurricane many years ago to get recommendations from her. We couldn’t get anyone to come until the following morning so we put a bucket and a big metal mixing bowl surrounded by towels on the floor and pots on the stove. Beth and I worked around these receptacles as she made dinner and I did the dishes, the latter activity by the light of a camping lantern because the dome of the light fixture had filled with water and come crashing down to the floor, where it broke, and even though was still functioning, it was wet and it seemed unwise to use it.
It rained on and off through the evening and little overnight but the bucket and bowl did not overflow and Monday was sunny and mild. A crew from our usual tree service came in the morning to cut up and haul away the tree. At that point we could see that most of the damage to the roof was in the overhang, but there was a small hole visible, unsurprisingly, over the kitchen. A roofer came in the afternoon and applied a small tarp. Before he left, he explained his superior tarp-applying technique and told me there was no chance any water could get in before we had repairs made. So you know where this is going, right?
Tuesday was unseasonably chilly (like sweatshirt weather) and rainy. And sure enough, while it wasn’t cascading out of the ceiling any more, there was water slowly dripping out of the light fixture and down the wall over the stove again. The roofer came back, applied two more little tarps and this time did not make any guarantees. We were kind of appalled that even though he’d told us it would be the same price for a tarp no matter what the size, that he charged us triple that quoted price because there were three, when a big one could have covered the same area. Needless to say, we’ve decided to use a different roofer for the main repairs.
It didn’t rain again until Friday, but the new tarps kept it out. We couldn’t do anything else until the insurance adjusters came to assess the damage and that wouldn’t happen until Memorial Day, so there was an almost week-long lull in roof-related activity.
After the Tree Fell on the House
On Thursday Noah took a bus to Silver Spring, had lunch at Panera, and saw a movie (Men). When he got back he said it was the first time he’d ever been to a movie theater by himself and I asked what it was like and he said pretty much the same but with no one else to pay. He’s been home two and a half weeks now and we’ve read a book (The Desolations of Devil’s Acre) and started another (The Magicians) and watched a season of a television series (The Wheel of Time) and started season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and he and Beth are watching that new Star Wars show and he’s watched a couple episodes of Dr. Who with North and he’s reading Game of Thrones and watching I don’t know what on his own. He has not been looking for a summer job, other than letting Mike know he’s available, because he still doesn’t know if he’s leaving for Australia in July or September, which he thinks would be relevant to potential employers and I guess he does have a point.
The reason he doesn’t know is he’s still waiting to hear if he’s been accepted to one of the two programs to which he applied. Inconveniently, it’s the one with the earlier start time (in Melbourne). In fact, he thinks if he doesn’t hear soon there won’t be time to apply for a student visa (you need an acceptance letter to do it) so he’s leaning toward the program to which he has been accepted (in Queensland).
North is looking for a job. They had an interview at local bakery and didn’t get the job but they’ve also applied to Giant, Panera, and Starbucks. Plus, they’re taking an two-week online drivers’ ed class that meets in the evenings so they’re busier than usual. Beth took them out to practice for the first time Sunday in a parking lot at the University of Maryland and it went well.
Saturday we went strawberry picking. When we set out, I didn’t realize how happy it would make me to be all together in the car, listening to Lady Gaga, going somewhere farther away than North’s school (which was the site of our last all-family outing when we saw the spring musical during Noah’s spring break). We didn’t even leave the county, but still, it felt like a tiny adventure.
North made sure to wear their strawberry crocs for this expedition and apparently a lot of people had the same idea. As soon as we arrived we saw a baby in a strawberry sleeper, and at least a half dozen little girls in strawberry t-shirts and dresses. (I had not realized strawberries on children’s clothing were so gendered.) North was so taken with the sleeper they resolved on the spot if they ever have children and they take them strawberry picking, they will buy them some strawberry-themed clothes for the occasion.
We’ve been to Butler’s to pick berries a couple times during the pandemic, but this was the first time they were running the wagons instead of having people drive out to the fields. We deliberated about masks. The wagons are open-sided and we generally don’t mask outside, but the benches can get crowded. Three out of four family opted to mask on the wagons and we were in the minority of riders, but not alone. North wore theirs in the field, too, but I think they may have just forgotten to take it off. (They’re so used to wearing one at school they sometimes leave it on for a while after they get off the bus.) We picked four quarts relatively quickly and stopped there because we didn’t want to pick more than we could eat before they spoiled.
Attracted by the smell of frying doughnuts, we visited the snack bar, where we got strawberry-frosted doughnuts, a cream-filled strawberry roll, a strawberry slushie and iced tea. (I had half the strawberry roll and it took my blood sugar right up to the limit of where I was willing to go.) We skipped the giant slide and the farm animals and headed for the farm market where we got produce, two tomato plants, local cheese, Amish pasta, and more treats. Then we drove home, listening to Taylor Swift. It was a highly satisfactory outing.
Two days later, Memorial Day, was a busy day. North went out for lunch to a diner in Silver Spring with three friends, Beth and Noah installed one of our two AC window units, Beth put tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants in the ground, and I made our Memorial Day picnic, with some KP help from Noah. The traditional menu for this meal is carb-heavy—including potato salad, corn, watermelon, baked beans, and strawberry shortcake. I decided I’d just have smaller servings of everything and see how it went. We eat this same picnic three times a summer (also at the Fourth of July and Labor Day) so it was worth the experiment. I added a hard-boiled egg to the potato salad and made devilled eggs, and had two hot dogs with melted cheese, in hopes the protein and fat would balance out the carbs. It seemed to work, surprisingly well, actually.
I can usually make reliably good shortcake, but this year I used a new recipe and didn’t read it carefully enough and I failed to chill the dough and they came out more like cookies than biscuits. I was disappointed about this because if I was going to eat dessert after an already risky meal, I wanted it to be just right. But then as I was cooking other things “MacArthur Park” came on in my music and singing along loudly was more therapeutic than you’d think, even though the problem was not that someone left the shortcake out in the rain and no sweet green icing was running down. And no one refused to eat the cookie-like shortcake topped with strawberries, blueberries, and whipped cream, so I guess it wasn’t a disaster.
The other thing that happened that day was that the insurance adjusters came to inspect the damage to our roof. Xander quickly made friends with one of them, twining around her legs and gazing up at her. Either he really took a shine to her (he really has never met a person he didn’t like) or it was because while the four people were talking in the kitchen she was standing closest to the refrigerator where his cat treats are kept.
It will be a couple weeks before we hear back about how much money we’ll get and as the current tarps seem to be doing their job, we’re not in a hurry, so we’ll wait to see what they say before we hire roofers and painters. This will probably be a long process, because that’s what happens if a tree falls.
When Children Die
I wish I could end the post here, but it seems wrong to chatter on for over two thousand words about housekeeping, and home repairs, and a day trip, all of which happened during the week of our worst school shooting in almost a decade and not say something about it. But what is there to say that hasn’t already been said?
When the shooting in Newtown happened, North was in first grade, just like the victims. When the shooting in Parkland happened, Noah was in high school, just like the victims. And now my niece is elementary school, just a year younger than the fourth graders in Uvalde who lost their young, precious lives so senselessly. I can’t fathom the grief of their families and it makes me heartsick how little progress on sensible gun reform we seem to have made as a nation in past nine and half years.
But that’s not the same as giving up. I wrote a check to the Brady Center and we will probably be marching in the gun control march in DC the second weekend in June. Because that’s what happens when there’s a mass shooting big enough to startle us out of our complacency. But of course, these shootings are happening all the time, (fifteen shootings with at least four dead since Uvalde, in case the article is behind a paywall for you). I know a check and a day spent marching isn’t enough, but it’s what I’ve got.