The Book of Roof

This is the roof over the front porch of our house.We’re not shoveling it.David doesn’t believe in the practice for places other than the walkways. For years he practiced only solar shoveling on the driveway; that’s what he called it: ‘solar shoveling.’ I’m not sure just when that changed and we began hiring a guy with a plow on the front of his truck. It may have been around the time the sweet softness of the mothering hormones ebbed in my body, causing me to turn a mite more male in my manner, which is to say more BLUNT in a merry sort of swashbuckling way.All he has to do now when it snows is take his mighty upper body strength out and do the steps and sidewalks, which I’ll be the first to admit he does very faithfully. But this new thing with shoveling your roof? This shoveling–the-roof thing he’s never gonna do.I have two rooms where I spend most of my non-cooking hours. One is the guest bedroom which I use for answering letters from the people who write me and the other is my so-called office if you can say that about a room that’s full of candles and pictures of the dead and props for all the funny videos I’m going to make any day now. Both look out in this porch roof, the same roof my oldest child used for sneaking out as a high school freshman. The same roof our cats loved to pad around on, surveying the neighborhood.I look out at it all day long lately thinking, “Today? Will this be the day it collapses and kills the mailman?”  I guess I could drag my own little Irish fanny out there and shovel it off but it’s so much more fun to stay inside and play the aggrieved princess.I looked out at the above picture for a really long time just now before I finally noticed the photo  of my two men, propped in the corner of the window frame. Don’t they look nice? Maybe it’s OK that I'm so idle and whiny as long as I love everybody to death who gets within 50 yards of me. Kinda countin’ on that to tell you the truth.