Entry #296
February 24, 2026 — 12:15 AM
I came down to the kitchen to get my hands steady. The storm set its teeth on the eaves and shook the window over the sink in a predictable rattle, the kind that makes the spoon roll in the cup by degrees until it clicks on porcelain and stops. The overhead fixture hummed. My jacket dripped onto the mat I cut from roofing felt. I rinsed grit off my palms, dried them on the back of a chair, and taped two fingers where the skin split turning screws wet with tanin and rain.
I’m not pretending this is smart. The landing is slick, wind knifes straight down the stairwell from the broken gable. The tarp I rigged at dusk is lifting. If I leave the top cleat with only two screws, the batten will work loose, the tarp will become a sail, and in an hour I’ll have water wicking through the lath over the north hall. Wet plaster crumbles, and it’s not the kind that forgives a night of laziness. Tomorrow becomes a week. A week becomes mold I can smell from the threshold.
I swapped out the bit in the driver and checked the spare battery. The first one was warm from fighting the wind. I set four more screws in my pocket, a short bar clamp, and a piece of rosin-impregnated cloth for boot soles. I know where the landing gives, where the new sistered tread has too much play at the stringer. I plan the angles. I hold the bannister with the side of my wrist while the other hand works, because the grain there is raised and grips even when the varnish sweats.
In the hall I put my boots on the mat and pressed the rosin into the soles the way you chalk a line. The house breathed through the vent stack and sent a cold exhale down the back of my shirt. I waited with the light off until my pupils opened and the shape of the stair resolved against the dark, that narrow silver wash of outside light along the edges. The drop off the landing is only a floor, but from the lip it goes to depth, and it listens when you stand there.
On the second step up, where I pried off the nosing earlier, someone had once scratched E.B. into the raw underside. It’s shallow, made with something blunt. The cut lines carried old dust like the silt line in a glass left out too long. I saw it when I pulled the tread and I didn’t like that it was facing down, as if meant for the fall space, not for people passing. I set the tread back because a hole at the edge is worse than a name you don’t like looking at.
I heard the shift in the house the way you hear a person change their weight on a chair you thought was empty. Not a footstep. A correction somewhere in the frame. That and my own breath and the tick of the rain finding new routes inside the walls. If that’s a warning, I’ve had worse from inspectors.
It’s not courage. It’s arithmetic. A little more risk now makes less trouble later. Also, I don’t sleep with a loose job sitting upstairs like a question. The practical and the stubborn are the same tool with two edges.
I’m going back up to seat the cleat and finish the batten. I’ve done the layout in my head. I don’t have to like everything this house says to me to keep it from rotting. One eventually reaches a point where stopping feels less sensible than risk.
— Thomas Hale