If you’ve read my blog or know me, you know that my grandma raised me. We had so many adventures. She also taught me so many lessons. I might not have realized it at the time, but now, as I think back on them, I can find the lesson she maybe never intended, but I took away from the event anyway. Some of these helped me develop my character and my personality. Every single day I am more and more like her, which is ok with me. One of my best traits is my tenacity. I do not give up. Once I set my sites on something, I usually get what I want either through hard work, diligence or a little fancy manipulation. This story really happened and as annoyed as I was at the time, it has become one of my favorite memories of our time together. I would do anything to get roped into one of her plans again.
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“Kim!” my grandma called from the living room.
I got up from my comfy spot on the bed where I was reading a book and went to the living room. Why didn’t I just yell, “What?” from the bedroom? Because you NEVER yelled what. You always went to her. It was a “rule” that was instilled from the minute you started communicating in my family. After 30 years of living with her, I knew the drill.
“Yes, ma’am?” I said.
“Sit down. I have an idea for a project for us,” she said. Two things that are important about this statement. The first thing: anytime she had a project it rarely worked out, which no one really pointed out unless she did, and usually the end-result was more humorous than devastating. The second thing: “us” meant I would do all of the actual work while she oversaw the operation.
I rolled my eyes and plopped down on the sofa. “Let’s hear it”.
“You know that garage in the backyard?” she asked. Do I know the garage? We have lived here since I was ten. The garage has never held a vehicle since we moved in during the Spring of 1979. My great uncle, her brother, used it as a woodworking shop when he lived with us. Since then, it has basically become the catchall for anything not of value or necessary for yard work. We have always called it the garage, but really, it’s more of a shed, and it’s completely dilapidated.
“You mean the shed that has been in the backyard my entire life? The one that houses the lawn mower that I used to mow our yard? That “garage”?’
“Don’t be a smartass. Yes, that GARAGE. Anyway, you know there are a few holes in the roof. I was thinking we could get one of those extra-large blue tarps from the hardware store and spread it over the top, then secure it with that heavy-duty stapler. What do you think?”
“I don’t really want to spend all day securing a tarp to the roof of that building that is falling down anyway.” I replied.
“Oh, it should only take about 15 minutes to get up on the ladder and spread it out then we can go grab some lunch.” She thought she could bribe me. I would eventually agree, not for the food, but because she would pout the rest of the weekend and tell our other family and friends that “Kim refused to help me”. No one would believe her, of course, but this was just easier. I had to get a few jabs in first, because as anyone who knows me can attest, I don’t know when to shut my damned mouth. Luckily, she was in a good mood.
“Oh, just 15, huh? Like the half hour it would take for me dig up every yucca plant in our yard and replant them under the windows for a – what did you call it? – “natural security system”. Or like the hour it was going to take you and Aunt Mel to prop our heavy ass iron and porcelain sink up on three thin pieces of plywood, AFTER you had destroyed the cabinet tearing it out. That kind of 15 minutes?”
She cackled her 61-year-old woman’s smoker’s laugh and told me to forget that, she was SURE this wouldn’t take long.
She gets up with her cigarette case and the cordless phone, as I glance at the clock: 12:25 p.m. We walk through the length of the house to the backyard where we stand and appraise the “garage”.
“Ok, there is a pretty big tarp in the garage. I’ll grab that while you set up the ladder,” she ordered, with a cigarette dangling from her lip.
I rolled my eyes and trudged into the shed. I grabbed the ladder and set it up at the front of the shed. Gramma came out with the tarp, and, after I had climbed up the ladder, she handed it up to me. “Ok, just unfurl it like you do a bed sheet.”
After several attempts of me flailing my arms around with this heavy tarp, Gramma starts to “supervise”. “C’mon,” she says in her Indiana twang, “quit screwing around up there!”
“First, this is a heavy plastic sharp, not a thin cotton sheet. Second, you can come up here and do it while I watch, if you’d rather!” I finally get the tarp spread enough to then move the ladder and grab the tarp from the side and sort of shimmy it down. Eventually the tarp is what can sort of be considered “flat”. It covers maybe 1/3 of the roof. Also, at least 20 minutes has passed. “Ok, that’s done, and it’s been 20 minutes,” I attempt to get out of it.
“Well, we’re just going to have to go to the hardware store and get a larger one. I was trying to save us some time,” she said. Here we go I thought. The rest of the day is shot.
“Ok, but we are picking up lunch while we’re out. This is going to be an endeavor, I can see that now,” I was sitting my foot down now.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s fine.”
After we have grabbed a quick sandwich and some fries, and picked up a larger tarp, we go home and make our second attempt. It’s now 1:57.
“Ok, this should be easier because the tarp is new and slick,” she offers as what I suppose is encouragement.
As, I climb up the ladder and repeat the last attempt with the same futility, she stands on the ground laughing and smoking, giving me directions, because of course if she was just a little younger and not on a blood thinner, she would gladly get up there and do it herself.
Once again, the tarp isn’t long enough to suit her. It’s 2:27. My thirty minutes of effort is not up to par. So, covered in sweat, dirty and itchy from all the pine straw and other crud on the roof, I trek back to Hiller Hardware for a third tarp. I buy the biggest size they make. It’s huge. I am certain we could use it to tarp our entire house and have some extra.
As I walk in, she jerks up from the sofa, where she has been…NAPPING! “Ooooh, I see. I am out running around in the South Carolina, June heat with your fifteen-minute project and you’re here in the AC napping!”
“Quit yer bitchin’. I’m old.” Well, how can I argue with that?
So, I stomp out to the back yard with her trailing behind me lighting her cigarette as we go. “If this doesn’t work, we just have to give up, Gramma.”
“Ok, Ok, well let’s try this one.” It’s almost four in the afternoon at this point. I climb up the ladder and start the now-familiar process again. Having done it twice, I begrudgingly admit to her that it’s a little easier now. “See! I know we could do it!”
“We, huh?”
Heh heh heh (smoker’s cough again)
FINALLY! I have the tarp spread out on top of the shed. “OK, here is the stapler.” I make the first attempt to staple the tarp down. The staple goes completely through the dry rotted wood.
“Gramma, this roof is like a sponge. There’s no way to staple it!”
“Just try it a few other places.” So of course, I do, and of course it doesn’t work. “Ok, I have an idea.”
“Oh hell. An idea is what has had me stuck on this ladder for four hours today!”
“Just listen. Just listen.”
I roll my eyes as she continues, signature, generic brand Ultra Light cigarette waving in her hand as she gesticulates her plan. “Let’s grab a few cinder blocks and just toss them up there to hold it down. If we don’t secure it, the damned thing’s just gonna fly off, and all of our (OUR!?) hard work will have been for nothing. So just come down here and grab one and toss it over.”
“Oh, yeah, ‘just toss’ a block of cement, huh? Are you insane? I am calling your doctors Monday morning, and we’re getting a CT scan. You’ve lost it now.”
“Quit being rude. Take this.” She fumbles to hand me the cement block and manipulate her cigarette.
I take the cement block and “toss” it as best I can. It sort of tumbles across the roof before it crashes through the dry rotted roof and drags the entire tarp with it through the hole. At this point, we both just lose it. We are laughing so hard at this complete failure of her plan.
When we finally get ourselves together, I say. “I am NOT doing that again. It doesn’t work.”
As we are cleaning up, she says, “Ok, we can try again next weekend.”
Incoherent Ramblings 