Weather whoas

There comes a time every spring in the Mid-South when the outdoors just gets damned hostile. We had such a beautiful and mild and relatively dry April. Then here comes May, thrashing like an atmospheric adolescent, tantrum after tantrum after tantrum.

It feels like we’ve been under siege from the outside for days, but it’s only been about 24 hours. Still, those 24 hours have brought, what, half a dozen tornado warnings in my ‘hood? Flash flooding all over Memphis and Middle Tennessee and in my back bedroom?

Leak. :( from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.

Apparently the limb that fell this past weekend did major damage to my roof. Who knew?! So Saturday morning at about 4 a.m. when I woke up to the eerie soundtrack of a tornado siren, the sky opened up and dumped lots and lots of rain into what are apparently two holes in my roof. And that resulted in water dripping down through my air register and, as I can tell from the damage now becoming visible, settling on top of the ceiling and just seeping into the drywall all around the room. Gross, gross, goddamned gross.

Pots contained the drips as best they could (had to empty the bigger one once), but I can’t even describe how it felt to stand there alone in that room with tornado sirens blaring and water pouring into my house and no idea what to do to make it all go away. It felt like part failure, part invasion, all terrifying. Living alone has its benefits, but when the atmosphere starts to collapse in on me like that, I sure do pine for a housemate to help me stave off crippling panic.

I snoozed off and on for a couple of hours. The leaking slowed to an occasional drip and the sun finally came up, at which point the entire city seemed to be underwater. My mom called to check on me and when I described what was going on in my back bedroom, my dad insisted, in no uncertain terms, that I better get my ass to Home Depot and get a ladder and some plastic and get up there and cover the damage ASAP. Or else that sheet rock ceiling was going to come down.

Sometimes it takes a dad to get one’s ass in gear.

So I swung by Phil’s and drug him to Home Depot with me. $150 later (ladders ain’t cheap!), we were back at the house, trying to psych ourselves into getting up on the roof. It doesn’t look that high from the ground but goddamn, the fall seems long from the roof. Ever the go-getter, Phil got up on the shingles and reported that I had two football-sized indentions to cover. I fed the plastic and tarp up the ladder to him and he methodically and neatly laid out two layers of plastic and covered it with a big blue tarp. I found bits of brick in my shed and flowerbed and handed them up to him. We were lucky that the rain held off so that he could get everything covered in time for the next deluge. And I am lucky that I have such a good friend who will help me out with this kind of shit when I just get so overwhelmed and can’t handle it. He’s been that good friend for me for so long. I am very lucky.

I left a message with a roofer and now I play the waiting game. And the hoping game. Hoping that the tarp stays put, that is. Because it has just kept storming all day and night and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow some more.

Work was insane. Sunday papers are bigger than the rest of the week anyway, but we were dealing with live flooding/weather stories and Beale Street Music Festival coverage. Plus we were down a designer on the desk. Shit got real when we had to head to the basement around 10 or so when a nasty-looking cell headed directly for downtown. Nothing came of it, and when we got back upstairs we busted ass to get our pages out and edited and we did it on deadline. And we put out a damn fine issue, if I may say so myself.

I’m spent. My bones hurt now that I’ve released all the tension I’ve been holding all night.

Tomorrow, I’m slated to go to BSMF to cover it for the paper’s website. Yes, I am batshit insane.