Fixing A Hole Where The Rain Gets In

I can already hear my mother chuckling. She does this when she hears how I spent my days off, puttering about the house. On any given weekend, I might mow and week the lawn, or maybe attack a tree that has become too assertive in its growth, but those are tasks for the two-day weekends. This was a four-day weekend. In a move that I could finally support, my union opted to get what would have been Lincoln's Birthday attached to the traditional three-day Memorial weekend. Now I had four days. Just enough time to replace half the roof over our back porch. Hear that, mom? I found a way to stay busy.
Of course, I didn't really give myself a chance to relax, since I started demolition on the dry rot Thursday evening after I came home from school. There was sunlight, after all. "If a task is once begun, never leave it till it's done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all." Or at least that's the poetic Christian view of things. I don't know about doing it well, since this is the second time I've had to repair that section of roof. The first time I did it, I went up the ladder with an eye toward getting finished, but had no particular vision. This time I was plagued for weeks in advance with measurements and possible geometry for making this process a smooth one. Like so many things about our old house, there were no standard distances between any two points, and I felt gifted by the two right angles left on the slab of roof I was able to salvage.
The night before was full of tossing and turning. In my dreams, I did the job nine times. Each time I refined my technique and materials. I didn't sleep much, but I had a solid feel for the job ahead of me by the time I got out of bed around seven. It would still be a few more hours before we could borrow a van that was large enough to carry our plywood and tar paper and shingles. And flashing. And tin snips. And nails.
It was just before noon when I started the actual construction, and the clouds confirmed what the news had intimated the night before: rain was headed our way. As my son and I toiled in the sun, we watched the weather begin to change. I hammered, he hauled things up and down the ladder, and as the sky grew completely dark, there were still a few shingles left to nail down. Then it started to rain. I didn't look up, I kept hammering. My son scurried about on the ground, putting away tools and extra materials as we raced to beat the storm.
When I was finished, so was the rain. Just enough moisture to test my resolve. My son held the ladder for me as I climbed back down. I told him we could wait a day or two to put some paint on the exposed wood. He was relieved, but I knew what I would dream of until it was complete.