“It was north of 60 degrees last week!”  I found this a bit hard to conceptualize, given that temperatures were now only in the forties come mid-afternoon. And mid 40-degree weather was feeling downright balmy when the wind wasn’t blowing and the rain wasn’t pelting our backs.  And I wouldn’t know that for nearly the entirety of the time that I’d be home, the weather would remain this way. Hats, gloves, rain jackets, tissues. All things considered, I could only legitimately feel grateful that there at least wasn’t snow in the forecast. Because this is New England, and come this time of the year, anything goes.

In grade school we were taught that, ‘March goes in like a lion and out like a lamb’. Or at least that’s the expression coined by somebody who was clearly not living in New England. For those of us here, we know that in New England the only promise is that eventually, the unpredictable weather will stabilize enough to compel folks to put their boats into the water.  Maybe in a month or so. But last week, watching the tall trees being whipped around in the rain, it still felt like that moment was a long way off.

Call it coincidence, deliberate planning or just the nature of how the work flow shook out, but this stretch of garbage weather was also the moment where we’d be planning to finish off a big outdoors project. One that demanded precipitation-free skies…or at least a break in the windy conditions. In the preceding days, the constant gusts were the biggest thing making the news, so if we were to have a crane roll into the yard and lift three tons of wood, rubber, and glass into the sky, the odds were not in our favor. But we kept pressing ahead with preparations. Because that’s what we as humans do, and when it comes down to it, there’s not much that is planned and then executed with elegant, Swiss-watch precision. Life just comes at you, and the particulars end up getting shoehorned in no matter how the atmospherics look.

But sometimes the timing does work out. And that was the case for the morning that we had the crane scheduled. I was up before 0600, listening for rain drops and recording the quality of the wind speed outside.  By the time I slunk downstairs for a coffee, I could see that the ground was wet but the skies looked like they could go either way. New England at the end of March.  The one promising observation I noted however, was that the wind had seemed to die down. Heavy things would be in light swing today. 

From the time I was a kid, many times I recall entering homes and observing a project that was in some state of uncompleted progress. Long and short-term tasks, small and high-stake undertakings that may or may not be someday completed, all just depending on how the order of days shook out. So where does one put “replacing the lantern room on a lighthouse” in that pecking order of importance? It’s hard to say. Much like explaining to colleagues that we needed to replace a lantern room in the first place—or even that we have a lighthouse at all…I find that I struggle even backing up to that point in my life. The point is that this is just that this one of the things that we in our little corner of the world are going to get done. Hopefully at the end of March. Definitely something to finish while our father was around to see it.

“I didn’t even look at the weather when I picked this date,” my brother told me. “It was just a date that I chose a month ago when they asked what day I wanted the crane”  Sometimes it is better to be lucky than scientific. This is what I was thinking as a small crowd gathered at the house to watch. This is what I was especially thinking as the new platform was lashed to the crane and our friend Bob gave twisting upward hand motion to the crane operator. The clearance between the sixteen-foot, 2,300lb platform and three two buildings it sat between suddenly felt very significant. Any wind showing up in the sky would have been a disaster. 

But up, up, up, it went. Slowly and with no sense of urgency. The crane hoisted it over the museum until it hovered over the uncapped lighthouse. Seating this thing in just the right spot would be the next task—one that my brother was managing from the drop platform sitting just at the interior top part of the topless brick structure that we helped my Dad build.  

I continued to shift nervously around the property, watching from multiple angles and from time to time finding myself stationed half inside the doghouse so I could hear my brother’s commands from inside, and then repeating them out to Bob as he directed the crane operator. Shift clockwise two feet. Go up. Now back down. Stop. 

After the platform was bolted down, next came the lantern room itself. Like the platform, the new cupola was rubberized—all measures taken in the hopes that the new structure could stand up better to the New England elements. The original one didn’t make it more than a decade, due to insufficient flashing done at the base, causing too much water into the platform. Getting around to building the new components took nearly three years—a project that for too long sat in uncompleted progress. Simply because life is busy, and none of us have us much fair weather, free time and extra resources as we’d like. But today was the day. 

At periodic intervals, my 86-year-old father would leave his chair in the living room and poke his head outside to see what was going on. Half perhaps because he couldn’t take the stress of this entire evolution, half because he was probably just tired and felt more at ease in front of the television. He had built this thing as one of his retirement projects back when he retired from the airlines. The lower brick portion is 12 inches thick, and to this day he wonders aloud what he was doing. Lighthouse Digest even once did a story on him. To my brain, this all just seemed normal. And once the old top had to be replaced, we kids instinctively knew that it would be up to us to replace it as fast as our hands could manage.

“One foot to go!” My brother’s voice now came from inside the lighthouse. The lantern room was just about to be set down. And then, with no ceremony at all, down it went. Within a matter of moments, he popped out the storm door and immediately set to work of fixing the thing down. Suddenly everything in our backyard looked like it had before, as if the natural order of things had been restored. While my brother live-streamed the event for family members across the country, I filmed the closer up evolutions with my phone— as much for posterity as it was for my father. I knew he’d want to see how it all went down after the pieces were successfully assembled.

Expect the worst, plan for the best. On this morning, it wasn’t more than a few hours before the crane was finished and was folded back up again. We gave the crane operator a tour of his handiwork before he hit the road (and we were not the strangest job he had taken on— that prize went to moving a dead whale from the lower Cape). Of all the days that I would be home, this moment would be the only one where the sun would come out for a few hours. My brother and I, along with one of his friends sat down on the deck and basked in the fleeting sun. Big sighs and just looking up to admire what we’d managed to achieve. Little did we know that a few hours later the sky would cloud back over and the wind and rain would return. It was almost as if the Mother Nature had shoehorned her weather around our particular task.

Later that evening, my brother would ask my father if he remembered how he’d originally routed the electrical wiring inside the lantern room. Dad stopped and tried to think about it. Then he shook his head, “That’s all gone,” he said with a smile, admitting openly that those recollections, like many from his mid-to-recent term—are becoming a permanent thing of the past in his brain. “You’re going to have to trace it,” he told my brother. During moments like these, I think about how we kids are now the demographic charged with executing the big tasks, and how the older generation we could always count on, they are growing more childlike. It’s kind of a weird feeling, but one that we just plow on ahead with anyway. Very much, I am sure, like how my Dad took over for his father who was once building surgical implants for patients in the Mass General Hospital. 

A day and a half ago, my oldest sister was giving me a lift back to Logan Airport. We were talking about life experiences in general (today she happens to be turning 50 years old). She made a sort of observational analogy that has stuck with me ever since. She talked about how your brain is geared to think that once something happens, it is all done and is not supposed to happen again. Like if you break your finger, and then it heals up. For no reason at all, your brain drifts towards thinking that the experience is finished and you won’t be breaking that finger again. But of course it can happen again, and that can be very frustrating. Life can be like that, and we’re constantly being reminded of these moments as we grow older.

So we’ve replaced the lantern room, years after we never expected that we would have to do it. We have hopefully built a more weatherproof model, but much like everything else in this world, not much is built to truly last. And the elements are formidable- especially those weather systems that move across our path. For now we’ll celebrate this victory, and tick a major project off of our list of things we’d like to do. No matter how long it does last, our biggest reward is now watching Dad get up from his chair. Mulitple times a day, he gets up and walks over to the window. He looks up at the re-completed lighthouse and laughs to himself. “You guys are crazy,” he says. And we kids just smile at each other, and then look right back at him.