T-9: Some Birthday

 Wes  celebrated his 60^th birthday on Tuesday and it was memorable---mostly for the wrong reasons.  On the positive-- if emotionally charged-- side, he taught the last class of his career on that day.  On the other side of the coin was the hot mess on our back porch.

Like all good maniacs, we are trying to address a big list of deferred maintenance issues before we leave.  One such issue is our back porch.  The plain truth is that the back porch needs to be pulled completely down and re-built.  Not only is it precariously balanced on a weak brick support on its southeast side, it is built so that it effectively blocks the light into the dining room.

We have wondered for years how to fix it because it has a critical, structural door to the basement that has to be accommodated into any rebuild.  The current porch is obviously not original to the 1908 house, and while it has some nice features, like an air-lock mud room, it is and has been a problem for at least 10 years. 

In typical poor Nethercott decision making, we chose not to paint the back porch when we had the house re-painted a few years ago.  We reasoned, “Why throw good money after bad, when we are just going to tear the whole thing off anyway?” 

So the porch has been sitting there, raggedy and unpainted, for years and years.  We finally figured out a solution, but of course, it will cost tens of thousands of dollars, so it’s not happening any time soon.  We decided to hire a local fellow Wes is friendly with to do the scraping and painting.  This neighbor is chronically un- and under-employed and was really struggling, so Wes thought this could help us and help him at the same time.

Unfortunately, hiring him didn’t involve checking out his painting skills. 

When I came home late from work on Wes’ birthday, it was obvious that the hire didn’t know beans from baloney about painting.  He had done a competent job scraping, and when it was done, just started painting, in the most higgledy-piggedly fashion, without cleaning first.  He commandeered one of my landscape tables, which was now covered in paint, spilled the paint bucket so that there was now a big splash of paint on the bricks, which he made no attempt to clean off, even though I had given him Goof Off for just such purposes.  He was painting over metal, wood, windows—unbelievably bad. The paint brushes are left to dry with paint on them.  There were five paint brushes like that.  Once a brush were fouled from the dirty wall, he just went on to the next brush.

So here I was bringing in bags of mulch and landscape stones, and a tres leches cake in a plastic container for Wes’ birthday.  It was already after 7pm.  It is all I can do to not go ballistic. 

Wes and I have some heated words about this mess on our porch.  Wes stands over the kitchen sink and eats his birthday cake while we figure out what to do.    We spend the next hour trying to salvage the paint brushes, remove the paint from the bricks and steps.  Wes ends the evening, painting the handrail, banister, and rail, while I strain and groan hauling 50 pound bags of mulch and placing rocks. 

We work until it is dark.  When we are done, the landscaping is finally done in the yard, the most visible part of the priming on the back porch is done, and Wes’ 60^th birthday has come and gone.

Wes keeps telling me, “Go listen to the answering machine, it will make you feel better.”   I dutifully go listen, sweaty and filthy, and it does make me feel better.  It's our exchange daughter, Louise, along with her mother and father, calling from Germany, singing “Happy Birthday” in English to Wes, before dissolving in laughter.  It makes us laugh, and reminds us not to take it all so damn seriously. 

We take turns taking baths in our deep, wonderful, claw foot tub and laugh at ourselves—our epically poor decision-making, our constant efforts to do the right thing, (which often ends up as the wrong thing),  and our need to remember--- that in the end, our relationships buoy us and keeping us moving forward.   Such are the lessons of 60 years…I think they fortell some more lesson-learning coming up.