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If you need someone to build an ark…

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If you need someone to build an ark…

“We’re supposed to get 1 to 3 inches of snow today,” he whispered, his shadow looming over me as I rubbed my eyes in the dark of the early morning, removed the toddler foot lodged in my ribs and tried to make sense of the horror of the first words I heard in my waking moments on the second day of October.

Here’s a tip, ladies and gentlemen: Unless you’re at a ski resort, this is not the sort of news you deliver to someone you love before delivering their morning coffee. I mean, just because you know it, doesn’t mean you need to pass it on.

I suggest lying instead. Say something like, “I think we should plan a trip to Florida!” and watch the stars and hearts appear in your loved ones eyes. She’ll make you caramel rolls for sure. Denial. That’s the lesson for today.

Because it’s been raining here for a good four days straight. The kind of rain that has kept the autumn ground lush and green, magically making white-topped mushrooms pop out of nowhere, keeping the yellow on the flowers and the road in and out of our house drivable only if you have a big four-wheel drive pickup, horse, tractor or hovercraft of some sort.

I imagine a hovercraft is what that water hauler was wishing for on Friday evening when he made the wrong turn onto our approach with his big rig onto a scoria road that couldn’t hold one more raindrop, let alone 25 tons on 18 wheels. And so there he sat, 50 feet of diagonal metal sideways across the only way out of the swamp we now call home.

ARCHIVE: Read more of Jessie Veeder’s Coming Home columns

And so there we all sat, effectively immobile, jammed, lodged, wedged and in no uncertain terms stuck, stuck, stuck with no hope of moving until the relentless clouds relented… which didn’t happen until Tuesday.

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And so we did what any normal family would do when trapped in the house for an undetermined amount of time — home construction projects.

Don’t be jealous. Because when you live with the kind of man I live with, the kind who gives weather reports to the entire household before you and the sun have the chance to rise, then you know that we don’t need to take the 30-mile trip in the rain to the lumberyard to resurface the floors, build shelves in the entryway, change the laundry room into a pantry, install four new lighting units and roll out homemade noodles for supper to boot.

Because we have everything we need to survive the apocalypse scattered like a tornado of mismatched nuts, bolts, tools, scrap metal, tiles, epoxy, wire, wood, gears, motors, ladders and deep freezers in the garage attached to this house that will forever be a work in progress.

Yeah, my man’s prepared to be stranded, I tell you, and not the kind of stranded where you stay in your robe and slippers and eat macaroni and cheese and watch Netflix.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got God on the line here… he’s looking for someone to build an ark and, well, frankly, I have some questions…

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