I have started out a couple of blog posts with the words “I hesitate to write this” for one reason or another. Usually, it is because it makes me a bit uncomfortable to write or it may do the same for someone included in the story if they happen to read it.

Today I am going to put my words down anyway. The act of writing them may relieve more pain for me than make it.

I have physical pain, with two very bad ingrown toenails that I have been trying to fix for months. There are some mornings when walking is not comfortable, with a stabbing pain running through my big toes. I think this came about by wearing sneakers purchased online that didn’t quite fit regardless of the size printed on the box and the inside of the shoes. They are just a bit tight and I stubbornly wore them anyway. I brought this pain about by simply not conceding the fact the shoes and my feet were not friends. I paid for those shoes and I was going to wear them.

Life can be like that too, can’t it? You find yourself in a place that doesn’t fit you anymore and it causes pain, not physical but it still hurts. That place could be a job, a marriage, or it could very well be a place you paid to live in. That was the case for Diane and me.

We are no longer residents of the motorcoach resort where we owned a site for twelve years. Last year we came to the painful conclusion that we no longer fit there. Over the years we learned to live with many problems caused by people in the park who didn’t agree with the way the place was when they bought there and were determined to change things. Those changes were HOA things or common ground things or keeping people out they didn’t want, disagreements over websites, etc. It came to a head for us when someone on the board decided they no longer wanted the clubhouse. He decided to come up with a way to condemn it and have it removed. I am not going to go through all the ugly details about how the resort now has a big patch of dirt that used to be the clubhouse. Let me tell you that I fought this idea with everything I had. I met with board members, and county building people talked to the developer and the folks who took an old building and repurposed it to be an adequate place to meet. Three of those four agreed with me but could do nothing to stop it. I did no good at all. I lost the fight, that sums it up. Diane and I couldn’t stop it on our own and that is pretty much how it was, we were on our own. The pressure of what this would do to the park and to us became almost unbearable. I was angry, anxious, and really felt bad. I was losing myself to this losing battle. I hated what it was doing to me. I was used to helping the park, doing maintenance, and working on the website. I had disagreements with other owners before but this was the absolute worse one.

That time really hurt. But the clubhouse, and the board’s poor decisions, many of which were not transparent to the park owners, are not the sole, or the main reason for this post, not at all. Something else happened during that time.

I had been fighting a water leak in our coach for a very long time. During heavy rain, and we can get a lot of that up here in the mountains, water would pool on our slideout toppers. If you are an RVer you know what those are. The bedroom slideout, the one with the bed, would allow that water to pour off the topper, run underneath to the top of the slideout, and end up on the floor of our bedroom, next to Diane’s side of the bed. So much water would come in sometimes that it would soak the carpet, run under the wall and end up in the bathroom leaving a two-foot trail of water. I would try my best to stop this by putting sham wows and towels on the floor which needed wringing out multiple times day and night. This was getting to be a real concern because RV floors will rot when wet for too long. We were planning to get a new vinyl plank floor in a couple of months and this water problem had to be stopped.

One day I did what I usually did during one of these heavy rain days. I would climb up on the roof with a long-handled car wash brush and push the water off all the toppers. This was a risky move because the roof was very slick when wet. I climbed the ladder with the brush in my left hand, put my right foot on the roof, and as I was pulling myself up my foot quickly slipped out from under me. I couldn’t stop myself from falling, sideways. I went feet first completely through the three-foot by three-foot skylight over our bedroom. As soon as my left foot hit it, it shattered with a very loud BANG. I found myself hanging on with my back on the roof of the coach and my feet dangling in the bedroom, the interior dome liner shattered and the day/night shade hanging by its strings over the floor. I pulled myself out of the hole.

Diane rushed back asking if I was okay. I don’t remember what I said to her, or if I said anything at all. I climbed off the roof, opened a bay door and grabbed a vinyl picnic table cloth, some rocks out of our flower bed, and went back up on the roof to cover the remains of the skylight. The rain was still coming down so I had to act fast, so fast that I didn’t notice the golf ball-sized lump forming on my right shin and the blood running into my right shoe. After making sure there was no water coming into the coach, I went in and sat down and didn’t say a word for a long time. Diane, very concerned about me, noticed my leg, told me I needed to treat it, and said “It’s just a skylight, you can order a new one, and replace it, I know you can do that yourself.”

“You don’t understand,” I said in return. “I know I can do that, but if I had not fallen through the skylight, I would have fallen off the back of the coach, hit the car, and maybe broken my neck.”

She looked at me. “Well, thank God that didn’t happen.”

I was a bit in shock but doing exactly that. Thanking God.

The next morning, we had no rain, so I made sure that the hole in the roof was covered as well as it could be. I duck-taped a couple of cheap plastic ponchos over the hole, leaving the vinyl tablecloth. I added more rocks to weigh it all down, the wind could be quite strong at times. Then I got online and started researching where to get a new skylight. It took a while but I found a company in Canada that had exactly what I needed and they shipped it out that same day.

A couple of weeks later, my good friend Mark and I took about a day to replace it. I started out by watching Youtube videos on how to replace a large RV skylight. You remove the tape and the caulk and the screws, pull off the old one, which could mean having to cut it loose from the caulk around it, remove the screws and then do the reverse. Simple. Not so much for us. We did the first part, removed all the tape, and then we discovered my skylight was attached to the roof with one-inch pop rivets, over thirty of them

“We will be here all day if we try to drill these out,” Mark said.

I looked with dismay at this very attached skylight.

“We are going to cut it out not remove the rivets,” I said

I then pulled the new angle grinder out of the car, that I thought I would not need, and was going to return to Harbor Freight. I really needed it now. We cut the old skylight out and made a trip to Lowe’s for a box of an inch and half stainless steel wood screws, a couple of tubes of clear sealer, and three rolls of 3M rubber double sticky tape. We put the tape down over the old one’s rivets and then knowing we had one shot to position it correctly, carefully placed the new skylight into position. We then screwed it down, with 32 screws, and sealed the edges with the silicon we bought. Then we Eternabonded the whole thing, pressing the tape down with a heavy metal roller as we went.

Afterward, we looked at our work and we both thought it was the best we could do. Now we waited for the next rain to tell us if we had really fixed it. Later that day Diane and I did our best to repair the internal dome and reinstalled it. I also repaired the day/night shade and hung it back on the ceiling.

It rained a couple of days later. The next day, which was sunny, I climbed up the ladder to look over the top and make sure everything looked right. It did.

I had my back to the street when I heard a loud mechanical squealing noise. A car was heading to the park exit and something seemed wrong with the brakes or the wheels. I dropped off the ladder and ran to the car as the couple inside was waiting for the gate to open. The lady passenger rolled down her window and I told her the car was making a very bad noise. She got out and the driver backed up and pulled forward again.

Something was very wrong, the car certainly sounded like it should not be driven.

“What are we going to do?” she asked. “We need to use the car, he has his treatment today.”

“A treatment?” I asked

“Yes, chemo treatment for cancer in Wytheville…I might be able to change it to tomorrow.”

She was obviously upset. Her husband looked the same. I made a very quick decision.

“I will take you there”

“Oh no that is too much trouble, we’ll just change the appointment and try to get someone to fix the car”

I figured that might not work, that they would need a driver and it would be me.

“Look, back the car up to your lot, going forward is obviously not working, and if you can’t change the appointment I will be glad to drive you to it.”

And that is just what I did. I told them to sit in the back seat together, I would get them there on time, and not worry about a thing. The couple was visitors to the park, were renting a lot, and had made arrangements months in advance to have this chemo treatment done at a clinic in Wytheville. The clinic made it very clear that they would not reschedule, they had to get there on time or forget it.

It took about an hour and a half to drive and I had to sit in the car while they were inside. COVID restrictions were in place and I was fine not being allowed into the waiting room. I took the time to call my dad and fill him in on all the drama that we had been going through and to tell him that I was helping a couple with a problem. That help was helping me as well.

On the way back, with a stop at a rental car company, they asked me questions about the park, the area, and myself, which included my skylight story. After I told them that she looked over at her husband and said to me.

“I don’t mean this to sound bad, but if you had not been up on your ladder checking on your skylight, and heard our car, we would have driven right on out the gate and who knows what would have happened. We could have broken down somewhere. I thank God you were there and are helping us. We really appreciate it very much. ”

I sat there for a moment and told her that they were helping me as much as I was helping them. I felt like the person I wanted to be again, doing good instead of being in a fight. Driving them to the doctor, and taking them to get a car, made me feel good, and I knew I was moving out from under a dark cloud.

Some days later, with a clear head and after much prayer, we put our lot up for sale. It sold over the winter and now we live next door.

We are doing fine. I hope and pray that the folks I drove to Wytheville are doing fine too.

Derrick