Damage from winter weather can be shocking

I have half of a gutter hanging down from the roof over the garage, tire tracks rutted in the front lawn and a hole the size of an aircraft carrier opened up on the property line of the yard. The hole is like the ones you see on the program NOVA, where some prehistoric animal lived 50,000 years ago and an archeological dig has uncovered part of several jawbones and detached heads with tusks thrown about like piano keys.

Yeah, spring is around the corner. I don’t know what goes on here but the destruction from a couple of months of bad weather is always huge. I used to live outside of Chicago, where monumental amounts of snow would descend and winds would howl off Lake Michigan. And not even a tile would fall off the house. Here, the sun comes out for five minutes in February and my house cracks in half like a hard-boiled egg.

It’s as if there was some sacred society that buried their loved ones on this plot when dinosaurs wandered the earth and then I had the nerve to build a house on it years later. Realtors never tell you about the ancient burial grounds unless you live next door to the Kardashians.

Aliens from other planets, never from here because they also have housing problems, would look down and shake their three heads in disgust that someone had the audacity to change history and put wood up and live like an animal, and so they just move on to other desirable galaxies. Just kidding, of course, everyone knows aliens only have two heads and three tails.

But seriously, everything seems to fall apart after a winter. Granted, we had unbelievable weather obstacles; I believe a whole quarter of an eighth of an inch of snow did fall, which may explain why my house now is held together with duct tape.

I tried to do all the right things, too. I saw a pre-dawn-hour television commercial for tape that weatherproofs a house. One strip across the sill, and wild orchids started growing all over the room. Palm trees flourished. The couple had all kinds of new friends who sat around in shorts in the middle of winter drinking pina coladas and talking about oil securities and future commodities in the stock market. Now this is for me, I concluded. Well before winter set in.

So early on, I went to the home improvement store to buy weather stripping. A bunch of us were walking around trying to impress each other with requests for weather stripping. The thing about it is that weather stripping comes in packaging where it is coiled up in a ball. What none of us understood because the extent of our reading Spanish are the words, “Adios Amigo,” is that ball is only 2 millimeters long when extended.

In other words, you would need about six truckloads, filled to the brim, to safeguard one windowsill. And so, rather than admit this we wandered like a herd of lost llamas from one home improvement center to another seeking more and more weather stripping. Eventually some of us became junkies, addicted to begging on the streets and alleys. Our thirst for this item led us to associate with dark, shady characters and go on dangerous internet sites where we spilled secrets in hopes of obtaining the Holy Grail of weatherproofing.

Finally I took my stash home and placed the strips across a door jamb. I have no idea if it needed it or not. I don’t even know if I had it on the right way. But boy, were folks impressed. Weather stripping! I got all kinds of coupons in the mail from the government for free greenhouse emission testing, and Greenpeace gave me a discount on membership. The only problem is the living room still disappeared into the ground. Maybe a glue gun next time.