When I was in Junior High my youngest brother was born. My folks’ three-bedroom house was already at maximum capacity with the previous 4 boys and one girl, so on his arrival, my older brother and I moved out to the garage where my dad had built a tiny room for us and platformed a couple of joists overhead to serve as our beds. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer and I fell asleep looking up at the old 1x6 roof sheathing with a few nails sticking through it. If I wasn’t careful getting in and out of bed, I’d end up with one of those nails scratching my head or back. It wasn’t the most comfortable room, but it was perfectly fine for a junior high and high school age boy, and it was different, so my brother and I embraced its uniqueness and made it our own, decorating it with guitars, posters, pictures, and model planes.
One of the best parts of that room was the rain. When I slept, my head was less than two feet away from the uninsulated roof, and there was nothing quite like tucking down into my warm bed, listening to the gentle patter of the rain drops landing just inches away from my ear. Sometimes my brother and I would wake up in the middle of a storm, that patter of drops raising to a roar. Sure, it disturbed our sleep, but it was exciting and wild; almost as good as being in a tent. When the rain got really heavy, we might climb down the ladder and open the side door of the garage and watch the rain pounding down until the mist of drops spattering onto the saturated concrete surface gave us chills enough to slam the door and scamper back up and into our covers again; shivering as our bodies slowly warmed the sheets back up.
Now, some 25 years later, I find myself in a similarly wonderful room for rain. Our master bedroom is upstairs with a vaulted beam ceiling and shiplap ceiling. There is no attic or insulation in our room, so the rain falls straight on that roof covered sheathing and tickles the surface of the skylight over our bed. The posters and guitars are gone, and the room is far more comfortable and appropriate for the working parents that my wife and I are, but when the rain comes, the sounds are the same.
But nowadays the wild, adventurous call of the rain is gone. Instead, it hammers angrily on the shingles to wake me in the middle of the night and remind me that it is testing every window I’ve installed, every exterior I’ve repaired, and every roof that I’ve authorized. My mind is not particularly rational in the middle of the night, and especially in the first heavy rain of the year, I will toss and turn for hours, pondering each and every diaphragm I’ve opened or repaired in the previous dry season; spinning down rabbit rails of worst-case scenario leaks and liability claims.
Some years I’ve had open projects; protected only by tarps and plastic strung up the previous day, after weeks of watching the forecasts and selfishly praying for drought in a land that is parched and desperately longing for rain. While I’m not exactly how well it speaks of me, I have become very good at engineering temporary weather protection out of tarps, 1x4s, and ropes; but even the best of my systems is not enough to give me clean sleep in heavy wind and driving rain. The pit in my stomach does not leave until I can arrive back on the jobsite when the storm has lifted and find my project in reasonable condition. Even then, my comfort in the success of a temporary weather protection system only lasts until the next look at the forecast.
I’ve still yet to receive the dreaded phone call informing me that something I’ve built has failed in extreme weather, and each year I continue to add to the list of work that could potentially leak; so it seems that I have not judged the discomfort of these sleepless nights to be enough reason for me to stop working on exteriors. But I do miss the days when leaks were someone else’s problem and I was free to welcome the patter of the rain on our perennially parched state gently waking me in the night, only so I could then shrink down into my warm soft sheets, leaving only my nose exposed, and drift lazily back to sleep without a care in the world.