October 13, 2003

We gots leafs in the gutters, Paw!!

Go n' git mah gun, Junior! And tell Ma to open up a likker jug! We got some shootin' ta do!
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We had gutters put on the Manor about a month after we bought it, and fifty years after it was built. Fifty years without gutters does wonderful things to cinderblock foundations. In many places, fifty freeze-and-thaw cycles have revealed the blocks' cindery origins, as their surfaces flake and crumble into chunky gray powder...fortunately, there is QuickCrete. I plan to cover the entire house with a hefty layer of it.

Elsewhere, wayward rainwater has eroded the mortar and, occasionally, delightful rivulets of it audibly trickle down the wall inside. I sit down there with green tea and a potted bamboo plant and pretend I have a restful Japanese garden in my basement.

Owning a house involves a series of regularly scheduled tasks. Mowing the lawn is a fast-repeater in the sunny seasons. Gutter-cleaning is a slow-repeater: twice a year, if you're on top of things. Our new gutters haven't been cleaned yet, but they're now full of parti-colored leaves which will soon turn into rich, fragrant muck-mulch if not removed.

But we're still better off than our elderly neighbor, who I haven't actually met, despite living next door for over a year. I'm sure there are reasons for that...he was inside for most of that time, and I hardly ever saw him. His wife died at home a couple of months back, after what I presume was a long illness. He might have been tending to her. Since then, I've seen him outside more often: stooped and shuffling, but wielding hammers and circular saws to build a new picnic table or replace a set of basement doors.

He needed to build the basement doors because of the gutter above them, which has turned into a planter. It's choked with green growing things: small maple saplings, grown from seed, some pokeweed that's produced a nice crop of hanging purple berries. Needless to say, all this gutter-borne fecundity restricts the proper flow of rainwater, which has been dripping onto the basement doors below, rotting the wood. Come winter, the gutters will host spectacular sheets of glistening icicles.

I noticed recently that there's a bright blue tarp spread over a portion of my neighbor's roof, which means that the half-dissolved asphalt shingles have finally allowed so much water to reach the decking beneath that it's rotted out and is now letting water into the house. Like its owner, the place has settled into creaking senescence.

Which is more than sad...it angers me, somewhat. Because the house is often full of relatives: a daughter, I think, and her kids, plus her friends or cousins, and an able-bodied teenager, another cousin, perhaps. They're content enough to hang out while the house falls down around grandpa's white-haired ears, to let a forest grow in his gutters, and allow his basement doors to collapse into the space below. After his wife died, the place was bustling. There were twenty-five people there for a couple of days, including half a dozen young fellows. Someone mowed the yard, cleared some brush, whacked some weeds. But the house itself remained as it was, with its dissolving roof and its plastic-taped windows and its skewed gutters.

Perhaps there's a reason for that. Maybe he's the sort of old man who doesn't want any help and refuses all offers. I don't really know. But when we got two feet of snow last winter, I shovelled his walk and his patch of driveway without ever having met the man, because it cost me nothing but some small effort and a little time.

My mother lives on the opposite coast, and is doing alright for herself. Still working, and paying the local handyman to build her a deck and enclose her garage. The things that I do around my own house--plumbing, painting, installing windows and such--I could do for her, as well. And would be, if not for the continent between us.

But you can be damned sure that if she lived next door, she wouldn't have trees growing in her gutters and a tarp on her roof to keep the rain out.

Sometimes, people just baffle me.