First, a digression. You see those two guys on Tik-Tok who tell what they call dad jokes? Such as:

1. My wife told me I was going deaf………… Boy, was that hard to hear.
2. Three conspiratorialists walk into a bar……… That sure can’t be a coincidence.

Back to my regularly scheduled programming. The village.

Next month, we are going to celebrate a special anniversary. Forty years in our house. Which was new when we moved in.

For the first forty years, you can pretty much ignore things, except at times of crisis. We did get a new roof about twenty years ago, and our insides (and outsides) have been painted a few times, one shower redone, and about five years ago we needed to redo our kitchen, but most things have been left on their own.

Over the past few months, the house has beginning to show its age. Our furnace conked out and needed to be replaced. We had to call an exterminator to rid ourselves of some small, unwanted guests. We needed to replace our kitchen faucet. The electricity went out in our basement guest room and bath. Our gutters needed cleaning.

And our outside, even after our lawn maintenance folks, trimmed and mulched for the winter, needed some sprucing.

We looked to see what we needed, and hired a company we have used before to: paint our outside trim, repair several woodpecker holes in the outside trim and install woodpecker shields, paint our exterior doors, replace some external wood trim that had outlived its useful life, and paint our front picket fence.

Three men showed up Tuesday morning to start the work. But since then the work has expanded, and keeps expanding. We decided that everything (house, walkways, patios and porches, driveway, and exterior stone walls all needed power washing, we added the garage door to the list of things to be painted outside, and trip around the doors, we added caulking for our two tiers of brick stairs in front, and on and on.

Well, when you get to be 40, things begin to go wrong, and you do need sometimes to have some plastic surgery. And one handyman can’t do it. You need a village. Or, even better, it seems you need a permanent staff. These guys are here forever.