soapboxdiner

Up on the roof

Finally, a break from the rain. So how do I spend this sun shiny day? Up on the roof - and not in the Motown fashion.

Picture this: The sun is shining and the sky is that lovely shade of blue that happens when week-long deluges spent from rent heavens at last wash all the smog away. On the ground, a 16 foot extension ladder and a girl. She's dressed tastefully for the occasion in fuzzy forest green jammy pants, a white oversized tank top, and a light jacket of the midnight blue persuasion. Gingerly, she steps up the ladder borrowed from Nosy Old Fart Neighbor, and she assesses the leaky window situation. Armed with a steak knife and bath towel, she ascends.

Creek creek creek go the girl's knees, as they complain about being knocked about upon the aluminum steps of the ladder. Five, six, seven wobbly steps up, and voila! she is eyeball level with the window's eve. Crafty eyes browse to the right and then to the left, taking measure. Yes, there is fresh caulking. No, woe to the girl, it is not dry, these 15 days post application. With an additional No for good measure, she sees that even the liberal, ney, copious drool lines of caulking upon her window, they are yet inadequate to cover the yawning spans of space between the frame and window.

The girl then takes the steak knife firming into her grip and attempts to slice through the caulk. Sadly, she realizes this effort is futile. The caulk, she is wet. Like an acephalic Fatal Attraction, she will not be removed or dismissed so preemptively. The girl coaxes. Please darling, bend to the will of my steady fingers and fill these heinous gaps. but the caulk rejects her piteous pleas.

Up the girl looks, for help or inspiration she knows not. But in that gesture a new dilemma stirs and thickens the plot. The rain gutter, he is broken directly above the sad, wet window. With each firm press to the house's siding, fetid black decomposing muck seeps from the gutter's crack. And up a notch or two higher upon the ladder, a tertiary concern is laid forth: the roof, the roof, the roof is all broken.

And the girl places a trembling knee up, and then another, and at last traverses the wasteland of her roof. Rust here, crack there. Only a matter of time until it, too, begins to leak. And so the girl returns to the edge and gazes miserably down into the muck in the gutter, like a dark crystal ball silent with solutions but wreaking of premonitions of what's to come.

And the girl gets a broom. She sweeps the mess and clears the muck. Like the gypsy unimpressed with prophetic fate, she bent destiny to her will. But will being made of aluminum, it bent right back at the release of pressure.

Time, time. Instead, the girl just descended. She applied strips of sun-softened putty above the window, and then adhered vinyl kickboard protectors to her house. Another row of putty atop them both, and she prayed to her Lord...

Make that damned stuff work, you bastard, because I'm fed up with rain drops falling on my gawd damned head when I sit on my freaking couch!

Only one last prophecy was had by the girl - this is going to be one piss expensive summer spent up on the roof.

1:25 pm - 03.15.03
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