King of the Hill
Tom writes: Growing up, one of my responsibilities was to help Dad clean the gutters (for all you young kids, in the olden days we did not have Gutter Helmets to keep the gutters clean, so you had to clean them out by hand). Every spring and every fall we would go borrow our neighbor's ladder and bring it across the street to our house. As a little kid, my job was to hold the ladder and handing the hose up to him. With the passage of time, the roles began to switch. However, it was a couple of years before I felt comfortable going up to the highest part of the roof - I did not trust the swaying of the ladder as you get halfway up.
For whatever misguided reason, society thinks that I am a grown-up now and that I need to keep my own gutters clean. Fortunately, the previous owners had thrown me a bone. They had installed a kind of screen to keep the gutters clean. But although the insides of the gutters looked good today, they had gathered a lot of debris on the screens. We discovered last night that our next door neighbor has a ladder that we can use, but it does not reach the highest gutters. So the next option: climb up on the roof with a broom. The roof is not too steep, so why not? And now I can certify that we have clean gutters - and a well-swept roof.
For whatever misguided reason, society thinks that I am a grown-up now and that I need to keep my own gutters clean. Fortunately, the previous owners had thrown me a bone. They had installed a kind of screen to keep the gutters clean. But although the insides of the gutters looked good today, they had gathered a lot of debris on the screens. We discovered last night that our next door neighbor has a ladder that we can use, but it does not reach the highest gutters. So the next option: climb up on the roof with a broom. The roof is not too steep, so why not? And now I can certify that we have clean gutters - and a well-swept roof.
