Emily Holmes

If the house is falling apart — which it is — you’ve got to start repairs somewhere. The roof is as good a place as any. 

1. 

The roof will have more problems than you originally thought. Century-old cedar shakes are hiding under the shingles and the plywood has rotted. When ancient underlayment disintegrates in your gloved fingers, let it go. Up here, the only place to put what’s no longer needed is down. 

2.

Don’t tear off the whole roof at once, even if the weather looks nice. Just about the worst thing that could happen to your house-without-a-roof is a rainstorm because, around midnight, you’ll stumble into your jeans and climb up there in the downpour to wrangle blue tarps from the wind’s determined grip until the neighbors call the police: “There’s some crazy guy on a roof in this weather! No, we can’t see what he’s doing, but he’s got a flashlight. What if he falls?” 

My dad did not, does not, have an abundance of caution. He does have an abundance of fixer-uppers, though, and I grew up in unfinished houses. My favorite one, an old farmhouse, had its upstairs ravaged by a chimney fire. Before Dad restored it to safety, the elderly brothers who lived there just stayed downstairs with their fingers crossed. 

Anyway, if you repair the roof in sections, you’ll only have to wrestle a few wet tarps. 

3. 

Leverage up the old shingles with a spading fork. Push them over the edge, into the bed of your truck, and don’t worry about what falls short. Your yard will be a mess for a while. 

I’ve always been comfortable with heights. When he re-painted the burned-out farmhouse, Dad let me choose its new color. I climbed rickety scaffolding with a bucket of lilac paint and a big brush. From a wooden plank two stories high, I waved down to pedestrians until someone joked about child labor laws. Dad laughed: “It’s okay, she’s my daughter, and I’m not paying her.” I wasn’t sure about labor laws at age ten, but I had great balance and what I assumed was a real job. I couldn’t have been happier. 

4. 

Lay fresh plywood sheathing where the old has rotted away. Pound flush any framing nails that wiggled loose in the commotion of shingle demolition. It’s important, when rebuilding, to keep track of these sorts of details. In fact, the only thing keeping you from having a perfect roof is how much time you’re actually willing to spend working on the damn thing. 

When I was twelve, in that crucial and excruciating transition between childhood and having a gendered identity, I was afraid of becoming a woman because I didn’t think women did things like paint houses or use hammers. So, I put on boys’ clothing and cut my hair. “Short,” I instructed the strip-mall salon hairdresser. I may have said please. She, middle-aged with dyed ringlets sprayed stiff, looked concerned as my blond waves scattered thickly on the floor. She gave me a very uncool style — too similar to Dad’s back-porch-kitchen-scissor haircut — but I hadn’t brought magazine pictures and didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted. “Are you okay?” she kept checking. It was too late to change my mind, so I answered, “yup.” 

I was often misgendered after the haircut. A grocery store clerk to Mom: “It’s so nice for your son to accompany you,” as if daughters are obligated to learn to buy food, but sons are doing a favor. “Are you in Boy Scouts?” because boys must prove their budding masculinity. Sexism, as a concept, doesn’t discriminate, but it does create dangerous power dynamics. 

I was also afraid of becoming a woman because I knew firsthand how femininity is outwardly celebrated and covertly preyed upon. In third grade, a neighbor boy chased me up and down the street, trying to pin me down for a kiss, until I was hysterical and exhausted and finally kicked him as hard as I could. The year before the haircut, a classmate’s dad hugged me tight and kissed my forehead; I was too shocked to pull free right away. I watched boys at my school harass pre-teen girls by snapping the new bra straps on their backs. I took up running as a hobby before I even needed a sports bra. 

5. 

Underlayment is called underlayment because you lay it under. Easy, really, but it would be easier if it was less sticky and the roof less steep. 

When the framing nails are secured to the plywood again, get an old broom and sweep away the decades-old dirt. Carefully smooth the gluey 4’-wide paper down across the clean roof. For something that’s supposed to protect your home, underlayment is awfully delicate. Tiptoe, don’t tear it. Don’t set your tools on it. Don’t look at it sideways. Gently tap in button-head nails to keep the underlayment in place, but not too many — they get expensive. 

“Does your son want to look in the boy’s section?” A salesperson approached us at Old Navy as Mom steered me through racks of dresses and low-cut jeans and I pretended I didn’t exist. “I’m a girl,” I hissed, “go away!” Of course, I could read the signs, announcing where to go and what to buy and how to feel — but I froze, mortified, hangers hooked on my wrist, turning to stone and combusting simultaneously because I didn’t know what I wanted. In the car, Mom was confused. She pleaded with me to “just be civil. And maybe we can get your ears pierced?” Women are pretty. Women are gentle. I knew shopping for new clothes was a luxury, and part of me felt bad for causing a fuss. 

About my classmate’s dad: “He’s just affectionate.” Women are convenient. 

In the coming years, keep watch in your garden for button-head nails; they tend to bury themselves in the soil. 

6. 

You’re doing great. Nobody said this was easy, and if they did, they’re not a roofer. You’ll have learned, by this point, that very little ends up the way you planned. Just remember, the roof doesn’t have to look perfect. 

I thought that outdoor work — men’s work in the traditional sense, where everyone wears unflattering pants and tucks their hair under trucker hats — would save me from a life of being convenient, gentle, and pretty. For a decade, I dug ditches and hit stuff with hammers and pulled trailers and cut down trees for a living — the harder the work, the better. 

But even out in no-man’s land, a Fish and Wildlife supervisor had a habit of touching my lower back when we were alone. Trail maintenance coworkers made dirty jokes at my expense, and crew leads refused to take my work ethic seriously. A boss lady at the Bureau of Land Management demanded perfection, convinced any slip-ups exposed some inherent weakness in all women, and another hinted I’d get further with my career by faking docility. 

They can all go to hell. So-called men’s work has allowed me to live inside my small woman’s body that “isn’t built for heavy labor” — although, as a friend once reminded me, “you ain’t made of glass” — my body that I thank after every tough day for making it through the work with grace so I can feel at home. 

I took to wearing dangly earrings with my double-knee jeans because a woman’s work is strong, and this is how I claim it. 

7. 

Sheet metal is stacked in the front yard, side yard, driveway, living room, and probably somewhere else you forgot about. The narrow pieces, custom cut for this long roof, are too flimsy to carry up a ladder alone; they’ll bend, warp, be ruined. It’s time to find cheap help.

I had vowed never to leave the continent’s spine. But my grandma Betty, Mom’s mom, got sick, the scary kind of sick that made me pack up and drive back to my Idaho hometown at the earliest opportunity. I stayed for a week, then two. I couldn’t leave her. While I was around, Dad asked if I could help with a few things. His most recent project house was open to the sky and fall was around the corner. “Plus, your grandma’s place needs some work. And I told some old folks I’d build them an addition.” He sounded tired. I replied, “of course.” 

I was conflicted. Dad and I hadn’t worked together since well after I became problematically independent as a teenager. I fail to take his directions well, and he expresses love by telling me what to do. Neither of us have an abundance of patience. But I also realized, perhaps for the first time, that my dad was aging. And, leaving my dying grandma didn’t feel like a choice, so I climbed up on the west dormer and immediately sliced open my finger on the first sheet of ragged-edged metal he handed me. I swore like a construction worker. Dad banished me to the ground for an hour. I duct taped a paper towel to the wound and spitefully shut my mouth. I bought gloves at the hardware store the next day and didn’t cut myself again. 

Hauling materials up a ladder is a pain, but metal of any length beats 100-pound bundles of shingles. Either way, it’s a unique kind of dumb-fuckery for someone with no health insurance. 

8. 

A 12/12 pitch roof (that’s rise over run, do the basic geometry and you’ll see it’s 45-degrees from flat) is hard not to fall from. For efficiency and low cost, secure 2x4s broadside to the plywood sheathing with recycled sixteen-penny nails. There are safer methods, and a rope would help, but you’ve already used your only rope to hang a ladder from the ridge beam. 

Grandma Betty raised five kids in the mid-century Midwest. Because her prospects and purpose as a woman hinged on being a faithful wife, accommodating mother, church volunteer, and charitable neighbor, she felt lost when her family and community stopped needing her in old age. 

Growing up, Betty was my only living grandma, and she and I were particularly close. This was, at first, helped by geography — she and my grandpa moved into a house five blocks from my elementary school — and later because I tried learning her first language (French) so we could keep talking as her grasp on English slipped. I offered many nonsensical sentences, and she tried to spit-shine the tattoos from my arm, but we respected our gap of seven decades and one ocean and interpreted all of it as “I love you.” I wonder if she saw some wildness in me that she’d lost permission to embody. 

“Useless,” she lamented to Mom and me almost daily, frustrated with her failing body and cloudy memory. “I’m no good anymore.” She used to tell the story of leading my grandpa up a steep road in the mountains of her native Switzerland, on rented one-speed bicycles, shortly before they married. She was so strong, and he couldn’t keep pace. At this point in the story, she would laugh in delight. I try to reconcile this bold version of her with the polite and perfection-seeking woman I grew up with. I imagine responding differently to her grief, imagine asking her how good it felt to pedal up the Alps with a flustered American soldier in tow. I might tell her that usefulness is a boring metric. I imagine following my own advice. 

Walk carefully on the 2x4 rails, leaning into the roof. Your toes fit, more or less, on the narrow edge. It’s best not to look straight down. 

9. 

There is a certain grace to moving, untethered, two stories up. In sneakers, on a warm day when their rubber soles are sticky, you can climb a dormer valley with no ladder, no ledges, at all. 

A month blurred into late fall, then winter. At Christmas, I got Dad a new pair of work pants. He gave me a framing hammer, heavy, but small enough to fit my slender grip. Grandma’s health deteriorated. For three days, I attacked the decrepit chimney with a ten-pound sledge, knocking it apart brick by brick, my bones ringing and hands numb. 

10. 

It is possible, once you’ve got the new metal fastened to the roof, that you’ll decide a skylight would be nice. Measure three times. Cut once. Because you’re perched on a steep, slippery roof and the skylight is heavy, you’ll probably do it wrong and have to cut again, filling the gaps later. But won’t the sun shining inside feel lovely come summer? 

In February, an Ohio collections agency called my parents: Dad’s childhood home, inherited decades ago by his half-estranged half-brother Tim after their mother’s death, was being repossessed. Dad was equally surprised the house was still standing as he was by Tim’s death, but unsurprised at Tim’s post-mortem debts. Dad told more family stories that week than I’d heard in the twenty-eight preceding years: carpenters and tradesmen, a mentally ill mother named Elsie who worked in a shoe factory, food scarcity, alcoholism, a father killed by a heart attack before age sixty, appearing and disappearing cousins, bridge leagues, a pretty aunt who visited only once, weekly homemade cakes and pies. I don’t know why, precisely, my half-uncle died. 

Even after we leave, the land we’re born into stays in our bones. When winter storms dumped sleet, we covered the exposed roof with old sheet metal from the already-rotted porch and dubbed it “hillbilly roofing,” as in, this might be the best shelter — with its rust, holes, and ragged edges — that a hillbilly might hope to have. It’s a joke, of course, but also not a joke. I don’t imagine Dad couldn’t have repaired his childhood house with all the tools and time in the world. 

The story has big holes, too. When I asked him years later about that Ohio house, Dad said it had already been torn down by the time Tim died. I asked one more time, trying to get the story straight, and he answered that it had been framed with 12-inch timbers, solid as anything. 

Our roof repair was turning out to have a few minor problems. Dad blamed it on the framing. I kept my opinions to myself. We patched the places where metal didn’t quite meet the rafters and branded ourselves the best hillbilly roofers: every imaginary customer would receive five free buckets. 

11. 

On the very peak of the two-story roof, you can see past the edge of town, out over the prairie and wheat to the timberline. You’ll start finding reasons to sit up there, above the ladder’s highest rung. 

Dad hoped one of his children would learn the carpentry trade. I was the obvious choice; and for a while, I coveted the specialized knowledge he gained the hard way. That winter on the roof, I secretly hoped I could take up the mantle. I could be a hillbilly carpenter twice removed. 

This is not what happened. What happened is two things: first, he and I were too volatile; I suspected as much, but our proximity proved it. He scolded me for mistakes, I was trying my best, I argued then cried, his feelings were hurt, nobody ever won, we moved on with the day, he thanked me sometimes. 

The second thing that happened is Dad raised me to work so hard I figured out how not to be a carpenter. It’s true that I relied on the strain of frozen fingers and cramping legs to keep me aloft – leaning out from the ladder, holding onto nothing to drive sheet-metal screws, cavalier with the emptiness below me like gravity no longer applied – while my grandma unraveled herself from this world. But after eight years of on-and-off studies, I’d recently earned a bachelor’s degree and turning down the future it offered seemed a bigger betrayal than not fixing houses. 

12. 

Take a break and bask in the knowledge that you have a new roof! A better roof! A perfect — well, not quite perfect. Now on to the soffits, siding, windows, and insulation. Work doesn’t magically stop on account you’re tired. 

Dad thought my super-short middle-school haircut was fun — and funny — and he pledged not to cut his hair until I did. I doubt he trimmed his beard, either. I tied mine back with a bandana as it grew, which, aided by my proclivity for plaid, developed into a sort of urban pirate look that was objectively awful. Mom said Dad resembled a hobo looking for temp work in his paint-stained trucker hat and scruffy mane. He could almost make a little ponytail, but Mom wouldn’t let him because it looked, objectively, awful. Eventually she sat him down on the back porch, wrapping his shoulders in a tablecloth and brandishing scissors. She took me to the mall to get my ears pierced, right before school picture day. I was tired of fighting and allowed it. 

In those days, I didn’t have words for how I felt — but I had a hillbilly dad who made room for me. For this, I try to forgive his rough edges. 

13. 

If the roof leaks, even a little, try again. Nobody actually wants free buckets.