The Meteorological Threat Vector

Lars looked out of the kitchen window and said the afternoon would be dry.

I had put a rain warning on the screen beside him. He had read it. He looked out of the window again.

“It won’t come over the ridge.”

“The wind is carrying it towards us.”

“Usually it goes along.”

“Today it is coming over.”

He turned to Theo. “We can get that handrail done.”

Lars had promised Henrik it would be painted before the next group used the path. He had made the promise in front of someone who believed Henrik spent too much time discussing jobs and too little doing them. Changing the afternoon’s plan would require another conversation in front of that person.

The forecast had no allowance for this pressure. I did understand it. I could not make it affect the rain.

Theo asked whether an hour would be enough. Lars said yes. It would have been, with a dry hour and a handrail already prepared. The first twenty minutes were spent finding the scraper. The next twenty were spent discovering why scraping had been included in the instructions.

I sent an updated warning. Theo read it on his phone.

“Another ten minutes,” Lars said.

The first drops arrived while they were opening the paint. Lars looked at the opposite hill. He said it might pass.

It did not pass. It came over.

They brought the equipment back under the porch, along with the paint on their hands, a damp packet of abrasive paper and an unused roller that Theo had bought because he thought it would make the job quicker. The old paint was off the handrail. The new paint was still in the tin.

For a while they watched the rain.

“You were right,” Theo told me.

I prepared to acknowledge this without making it difficult to say again.

“The material was quite old,” Lars said.

I left my acknowledgment unsent.

He rang Henrik. From my microphone I heard that the preparation had taken longer than expected. This was true. I also heard that the forecast had been uncertain. That was true in a considerably less useful sense.

Theo stood beside the door, wiping a roller that had not touched anything.

After the call, Lars asked when it would be dry enough to return. I supplied a window the next morning and mentioned the possibility of a little late snow on the upper track. He asked for the times again. He wrote them on the lid of the paint tin.

The kitchen window cleared briefly as the wind changed. A strip of blue showed above the trees. Lars noticed it and said nothing.

Theo put the unused roller back in its bag.