The House Painting Summer ...

Great Resentment or Painful Precedent?

I remember one year, my husband had big plans to paint our house up on “Heck’s Hill”. It was a ranch, but the back of the house was on the upside of the hill making it two stories high with a walk-out basement.

Most of the spring during weekends and after work, you’d find him busy buying paint and supplies and building the scaffolding for his project. Huge 5 gallon containers of house paint and other assorted equipment waited along one wall of the garage.

After a few of years of full retirement from a managerial position in engineering, he opted for partial retirement and driving a school bus for high school students. Once school was out in June, he would have the whole summer off for painting the house.

Wrong …

He hadn’t counted on the traffic accident that totaled his car when a driver ran a red light. The accident left him with a broken ankle, something else he hadn’t planned on.

I felt bad for him. All of his preparations, and for what? After thinking about it, I made up my mind. The paint was bought, the scaffolding built, and everything was ready. I told him I would paint the house.

No, I had never painted the outside of a house before, but I assured him I had a lot of indoor painting experience and I knew I could do it. When I saw the relief on his face, I was glad I decided to help.

Dark brown cedar shingles covered the entire house and garage. One thing I hadn’t counted on were the number of wasps and hornets who made their homes under and between those shingles. When I saw one, I pretreated it with wasp and hornet spray and waited. Trouble is, I didn’t see all of them.

I put on the grodiest old clothes I owned, made a pitcher of lemonade, plugged a boom box into an extension cord —-and I began.

It took me nearly the whole summer and I was stung by a couple of dozen wasps and hornets along the way, but like Larry the Cable guy used to say, “Git ‘er done!”

So, I got ‘er done.

I think the most laughable thing was the number of cars that drove slowly past, or even stopped, while I was painting. There were always two people in the front seat and what I can only assume was the husband’s arm extended, waving around and pointing …

(I smiled and briefly waved back ...)

I was helping my husband because of his broken ankle, but they didn’t know that —-I would only be guessing, but I have a pretty good idea what the men were saying to their wives as they pointed at this 58 year-old woman on the scaffolding painting a house ... by herself.

I was either causing great resentment, or setting a painful precedent … but probably a little of both.

(sigh)

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