This is what happens when you are snowbound for a week, due to back-to-back blizzards which dumped a collective total of somewhere around 30 inches of snow on your house: some of the snow gets in. On Day Six of our captivity (specifically, day two of blizzard number two), I came downstairs in the morning, turned on the gas fire, got myself some coffee and settled down to read what was left of the Sunday New York Times (there being no hope whatsoever the Washington Post carrier would make it up the hill). After half an hour or so, my 9-year-old came downstairs, pointed to the wall above the fireplace and screamed, 'IT'S MELTING!"
Nothing that exciting, actually; what had happened was that the fire's heat had melted some snow up on the roof, and this melted snow had encountered what hardy Midwesterners all know as an ice dam at the roof's edge--and so, as water will, it sought an alternative route: inside the wall. The "melting" my daughter saw was the weight of this water peeling a layer of latex paint away from the drywall--an effect that (since the paint in question was pale, pale pink) looked weirdly like the way a (pale pink) woman's abdomen sags after she's had two C-sections, not that I would know anything about that. [And yes, I did just admit to having a pale pink wall in my living room; it was put there by the previous owner, whose execrable taste we are gradually erasing, but not in the living room yet.]
So now we have this.....ah, sculpture above the fireplace, and given the backlog of calls into State Farm I think it's going to be there awhile. It's only been a day, and already I'm getting used to it. In a way, it kinda makes the house more ours, if you know what I mean; we've put our mark on the decor. I'm gonna call it Saggy Belly, and when in years to come people ask me what I did during the Great Blizzards of 2010, I will be able to answer, quite truthfully, that we sat around and watched the paint peel.
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