When you are in the middle of certain milestones of life, people around you aren’t so much interested in what you are going through as they are in telling you the story of what happened to them. Labor comes to mind. Weddings. Menopause. Death of a parent.

I’ve been through a few of these. I don’t have a good menopause story but the deaths of both parents provided me with copy. I’m now in the midst of another milestone: getting a new roof. Not just a new roof on the main part of the house, but also torch-down on the cabin roof, a new sun room roof and skylight replacements in the kitchen and bathroom. On top of the noise, disruption, dust and debris, the roofer’s schedule has coincided with a heat wave in Seattle so I am doubly, triply, no quadruply miserable.

Let’s start with the falling debris: tar paper, bits of moss and unidentifiable detritus in the garden. Vibrations from the hammering dislodged toxic powder that had been sprayed into a crevice to eliminate a wasp nest ballooning next to the sun room door and right over my organic tomatoes. I had been at great pains to protect the tomatoes from the dust for several days after the deadly deed was done, congratulating myself on my rescue op, when a fresh load of white dust was dumped on the sun golds.

Two lengths of fence were removed in order to let the gigantic dumpster park itself two feet from my bedroom window. There was actually an upside to this. Not its proximity but its existence. Having that drop box sitting there for a week allowed me to dispose of a collection of oversized, awkward and/or broken possessions like the card table from which I had inadvertently wrenched a leg. I was sorry to finally give up on that table as it was one of those leather-topped ones from the 1950s. My parents used to set it up for games of bridge and my mother had printed “Richmond” on its underside in her first grade teacher’s hand.

Toxic powder and small roof droppings aside, the roofer has been good about heaving trash to the neglected north side of the house, away from the garden. In fairness the north side already looked pretty bad, but now it looks like a junkyard. I’d list all the junk out there but I try not to look at it. This is the same reason I’m not posting photos. I have a vague impression of ladders, tarps, roof shingles and limbs of a locust tree that used to be growing across the cabin roof.

My inestimable neighbor, Bill (architect, woodworker, contractor, carpenter, furniture designer) found me the roofer and has been functioning more or less as the contractor on this job. Every morning he comes over to see what’s happened and what’s going to happen and then he interprets it to me. He is also putting in the skylights. All for the price of me feeding his cat Suli when he is gone for months out of the year. Or so he says. He may need some of those tomatoes, triple washed, of course.

I’m not getting enough sleep partly because of the heat but also because I am getting up earlier and earlier in order to have a few quiet and cool morning hours to read. The roofer comes at 7 so he can work while it’s cool. He drives away in the heat of the mid-afternoon leaving me with new piles of refuse to maneuver around and the hoses to coil.

I didn’t realize there was so much hose work in roofing. He’s got hoses and cords crisscrossed all over the roof and into the sun room and garden. I had only just trained Tim, my gardening partner to not leave the hoses lying around after he’s watered. I don’t think I have it in me to train another man. I complained about the hoses to Bill who on top of everything he’s already doing for me, also listens to my complaints.

“We’re guys,” he laughed. “You’ve got too many guys in your life right now.”

In truth I don’t have many complaints (that I’m voicing.) I am just so grateful that the work is being done and it’s not costing me my entire retirement. But long ago, 9 days to be exact, after the roofer had been at it for exactly six hours, I said to Bill, “This is taking forever!” But that was a kind of joke.

My brain is squishy. I can hear it when I move my head. Between the heat and the disruption and lack of sleep, I feel like a brown banana. The other morning I got out of bed and saw that I had left the front door standing wide open all night. If that wasn’t worrying enough, my next thought was even worse: “Did I just open that a minute ago?”

As I write, I am sitting in the back yard of my friend, Andrea whose cat I am feeding this week. I had this gig last year when Rocket the whippet was still with us. Now it’s just me and the soulful Fang. The timing is propitious. The same week that Seattle is sizzling and a roofer has taken over my house, I have a place to boil eggs and potatoes for potato salad without adding to the heat in my house. There’s also a lovely backyard and a cat I love.

The only down side is that two houses down, somebody is roofing a house.