The Case of the Missing Branches

          The saga of the storm continues. Sunday, during the NFL playoffs, I went into the laundry room (on the bottom floor of our house) to throw a load of laundry in. When I reached into the pile of dirty clothes in the laundry chute, the clothes were wet. We didn’t get that wet when we were cleaning the yard up although it had been raining.

          I climbed up onto the counter and stuck my head up into the laundry chute, which is under the master bathroom sink. I felt the drain pipe. Was it wet or was it just cold because it’s close to an outer wall? I wiped it with a to-be-laundered t-shirt. It was wet.

          Upstairs, the NY Giants vs. San Francisco 49ers game went into overtime. I waited until the game ended, before I told “the boys” that the sink was leaking. They disappeared immediately, even though dinner was ready, and came back to tell me that the water wasn’t from the sink. They thought it was from the roof, leaking down through the outside wall. We ate dinner, and then they confirmed their “diagnosis” by peering up into the attic.

         The next day, Monday, John called our insurance company. He explained that we’d had over 30 branches land on our roof in the snow/ice storm, and now the roof was leaking. They contacted one of their roofing contractors from Seattle (the ones nearer to us were all booked up after the storm). I was relieved. I didn’t want John or Johnny to get up on our shake roof because it is (to borrow a friend’s gross, but extremely accurate phrase) “slippery as snot” up there.

          When I got home, at 4:45, there were two phone messages from the contractor trying to set up an appointment. John called him. They would meet at our house at 1:00 the next day.

          At home after work on Tuesday, Johnny told me this bizarre story. He was at work when his cell phone rang at 12:30.  It was John, “Did you get up on the roof before you left for work, and take the branches down?”

Johnny guffawed, “No!”

“Well, there aren’t any branches on our roof!”

Johnny was as baffled as his father.

John saw our neighbor across the street clearing debris from his yard. He asked him, “Did you see anybody up on our roof?”

Tom told him that he had seen a man up on our roof the day before clearing branches off. There was no company name on his truck. It made no sense. They scratched their heads, and decided that maybe the mysterious branch clearer had gone to the wrong address.

Second phone call to Johnny: “What’s the password to your mother’s computer?”

“Why?”

“The roof guy is coming, and I need proof that there were branches on the roof.  I need to show him the pictures your mother took for her blog.”

Branches on the front part of our roof.

Branches on the roof on the back of our house.

When Nordic Services showed up, more phone calls were made. Apparently, when our insurance company contacted them, one of their guys was in our area. Before we even set up an appointment, he went to our house and cleared the roof. He didn’t tell anybody.

Case of the disappearing branches solved. It wasn’t a wrong address, clean up fairies, or industrious menehunes. It was an eager, efficient contractor.

That night a windstorm blew through. There are branches up on the roof again, but not as many as before. So, when they come to fix the roof, John’s story will be more believable.

Laura Keolanui Stark will confirm that there really were branches on the roof! She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.