Up On The Roof

Ron was puttering around his house when I rolled my kit onto the front yard to load up for leaving. My head was already re-packing Crow Dog, my backpack, and ascending the next climbing range out of Thermopolis. In the driveway a large stack of bundled shingles on a palet await a new life twelve feet up. Somehow I hadn't noticed them until now.
"Hey Ron, when are you going to get to the burnt corn flakes up on the roof?" Ron and I stare up at the roof and I feel my mouth open up and indirectly begin to offer to strip two layers of vintage sun toasted flakes and cut and set three days worth of ashphat rectangles with the addition of more shingles on the way. It is a simple straight forward roof with no obsene peaks or valleys. I think quickly of the road, and let the idea of leaving melt from my brow.
"Well, I have been waiting for cooler weather, and it wasn't a project I wanted to undertake myself, and...well, what are you saying? If your suggesting that you know how to roof and would like to volunteer to help me through this I sure wouldn't say no." Ron is a shining smile standing in his driveway. I smile back, already beginning to pull my cart on new tires reflecting the sun back into the garage. It feels good to offer up a service that is larger than carving a wooden bear out of firewood, or taking a frame off an old truck, mounting a bronze angle to a rock in a garden, or feeding horses for a week in an artic Oaklahoma ice storm. These were all roads before this one that blessed the giver and the reciever but short lived. Looking at the shingles, a task now ahead of me that I used to enjoy like a toothacke and have done at least a hundred times. I know this time will be different. Roofing will be stories and the making of a good friend with the company of Ron. There will be no shouting orders, no racing to reach a goal that constantly moves into a unrewarding distance, or moving under a tyrant while being reduced to slave status that guts my heart quicker than a sharpened spoon. "Work or talk. You can't do both.," was one of the constant montra's that took the light from my eyes, my day. I have left that world happy never to return. I will be working with a friend. We will sit on the roof and sip spring water while talking about our Creator, the value of a good truck, and a the making of a backyard fire out of cedar shakes that pile below us.
In the next week the roof will be stripped, sealed with new drip edge, new boots for all the piping vents, tarpapered, and shingled with each 75 pound bundle carried up a weak ladder between evenings of easy conversation as popcorn pops into a bowl, and little details in my gear are honed for the road ahead with a calming peace of remembering the wandering that brought me here.

Leaving is easy. The heart has its own cadence though; its own step. It feels healing to share a morning cup in Ron and Debra's livingroom knowing the roof is moving through its course toward completion, an easy transition from dry rotted boards layered over old asphalt shingles into a finished project that draws our lives together through rest and production, and a natural appreciation for being fully alive in this moment.
It is evening and the cheeseburgers spit on the grill while Ron and I act silly in the kitchen, laughing like punch drunk teens until I'm sure one of us just snorted. We have been on the roof all day and it is 7pm. We just came down...and we are just coming down. The roof will be done soon, and for the first time I feel a little sadness with its end in sight. I hear the road begin to whisper again with urgency free from its mouth. "There is no hurry. I will wait for you. I will tell you secrets when you return. For now, live this moment your in, enjoy these people I have brought you to. In a little while, I will show you more things than you can imagine. Remember, you have been alone a long time, and when you return to me it will sound the same."