The Roof over my Head

Two workmen are doing some work on the roof over my head. On and off for a year now they have been reroofing. Last summer there were workmen (all men) up there every day doing stuff, usually a couple or three or more Spanish-speaking folks with large straw hats, like strawberry pickers wear, and a radio set to Latin American music. If the radio bothered me when I was working they’d move it to the other side of the roof, over my neighbors, who weren’t there, who worked all day, one at Facebook, one at Google. Until I got tired of the boards slamming down over my head, I’d take them supermarket pies for lunch. Sometimes. My nextdoor neighbor took them soft drinks.

The workmen today are Greg and Chuck, and they are replacing boards in the eaves. They hang over the side, attached by ropes to a beam, like climbers on El Cap. I prefer not to think about that part. And I’m trying not to mind the noise.

Reading a book by Dominique Rolin (1913-2012) called La Rénovation (The Renovation) about her apartment building on the Rue de Verneuil in Paris being renovated, gutted basically. She lived through it, She was a tenant, but because of her age (80 +) because of a postwar French law known famously as the Loi de ‘48, they couldn’t evict her. So they tried to kill her instead. She held on, and even wrote a few more books.