I mentioned before my Mother had quite a knack for “expanding” the truth on a story.  One such story was the one where my bedroom ceiling fell in….

The house I grew up in was built in 1957 as a single story 2-bedroom  home.  When my mother became pregnant with me, a fourth child,  my parents added on a “Dormer”.  Essentially, a 2nd floor with 2 more bedrooms and another bathroom.   A Dormer typically has a flat roof-top, which is important to this story.

Fast forward about 15 years of snow, rain, heat, home roof repair work and  I am now in the 7th grade.  Over the summer, my ceiling had been dripping on me whenever we had a heavy rain.  So much so, that when it rained, I had to put a bucket on my bed and slept on an old cot we had for the boys for camping.

One night, I am  on the cot because the rain had been so bad and now the ceiling is sagging over my bed and dripping.  My cat Goliath, a beautiful dark gray tabby, is sleeping on the end of the bed.   I had just turned off the light to go to sleep and there was a CRASH!  It scared the heck out of me!  I jumped off the cot, flipped on the light to see the ceiling had crashed in on the bed along with a lot of water.  There was dry-wall and insulation on the bed as well as hanging from the ceiling.   Poor Goliath was hiding somewhere in the room.  By the time I quickly assessed and opened the door to the hall, my brother Keith was there too, trying to figure out where the noise came from.  We went downstairs together and told my mom what happened.  She helped me clean up a bit, I was already set up on the cot and went to sleep.  I still didn’t know where Goliath was.

By noon the next day, a friend and neighbor down the street, Lynnie, comes by to see what all the fuss is about.  When she came over, she said ” I came to see what REALLY happened to your ceiling and room”.  We all knew about my mother’s knack for making things bigger and better.  I take her upstairs to show her and tell her what happened.  She starts to giggle.  “Well,” she says, “Your mom is down at Margaret’s telling the story that you were in the bed, the ceiling creaked so it woke you and you were already downstairs telling her about it when it crashed in.  The crash was so loud the whole house shook and when you came back upstairs together, there was Keith sifting through the rubble on top of the bed calling  JILL!, JILL!.  Where are you?”

Lynnie and I were laughing so hard by the time she finished the story.  If you had known my brother and I back then, the story my mother told would never have played out that way.  Of course, when she got telling a story, it could be so convincing….she had all the ladies in the neighborhood with their hands to their mouth gasping at the horror of it all.

My brother and I have laughed about that story over the years.  We both still have the same reaction; “right…..like he would have been digging through the rubble in a frenzy trying to save me”.   But I must say, every time I see a drip or water stain on a ceiling, I think of that story and it makes me smile.  🙂

As for Goliath, he was fine.  He was scared and didn’t come in my room for a long while.  It took my dad over a year to fix the hole the cave-in left in the ceiling, but by the time I was in the 9th grade, I had stolen Keith’s room for myself and he was stuck with the repair.   But that is a story for another time…….