It’s January, and I’ve got a tree on my roof. I’m sure at nearly any other point of my life, this would disturb me, but I find myself with a lot of perspective these days and not much alarm. The ice storm ripped though while we were out of town and a neighbour called me with the news of the crashing tree, the 90-year old branch on my 90-year old house.
Safe at my parents’ house for the holidays, I found myself simply glad we weren’t there to deal with it. The neighbour’s husband dutifully stuck his head into my attic to see if the roof was still intact. It appeared to be holding. Good enough for me. I continued my holiday with family and came home a week later.
Now, a month later, the tree is still on my roof and the roof is still intact, as far as I know. The insurance file is grindly slowly through the system, and arborists have me somewhere at the bottom of their priority list. The branch is massive, stretching across my roof and all the way across another neighbour’s roof. His roof is also holding, and he and his husband seem just as patient and unperturbed as me. He invited me over so I could see the break from his back window, inches away from the trunk, so I could get the best picture. We talked companionably about trees and roofs and people far worse off than we. If nothing else, there will be firewood come spring.
The sheer volume of life experience by the time one has reached one’s forties has got to be good for something, and I find myself grateful for all of it. The previous houses I’ve owned, the previous infrastructure damage, the previous insurance claims. The certainty that as miserable as this winter is proving to be, spring will come, and the ice will melt, and the sidewalks will become passable again. Already the days are becoming noticeably lighter in the morning at daycare dropoff, after two months of near darkness, and we get home at night before it is absolutely pitch black.
Other small mercies are slipping in as well. I was bedridden one terrible morning, two small feral children oblivious downstairs. A quick croaked phone call and a friend came through the front door, collected the children, gathered a few clothes, and was off with them for the day – and I never had to get out of bed. A few weeks later, chipping away at my icy walkway in the January rain, I was moved beyond words when an elderly neighbour came by to help me chip and shovel, joined within a few minutes by his son. We all worked together while my 5 year old “helped” and my 3 year old napped inside, and then they went away, the job done, my arms aching only half as much as they would have been without the help. Small mercies.
A fourth neighbour, lucky to find salt in this salt-less frozen city, offered me whatever I needed from his stash. “If we ever have anything you need, you can have it,” he said simply. Earlier this winter I’d brushed snow from his car when I did mine at dawn, and then one day mine was brushed off in return. We mostly just wave in passing, but I know his mother is sick, and money is short. Sharing salt and brushing snow is what we can do without saying much.
It’s January and I have a tree on my roof. But we are warm and cozy inside, we are surrounded by friends and neighbours, and I’m old enough to be grateful rather than alarmed. Spring will come with time, and we’ll have firewood to share.