During the hurricane, it was raining cats and dogs and cows at my house

California rainstorms have been playing design havoc with my bedroom ceiling. Last year found me having a cow over the cow painting itself on the ceiling. The mysterious bovine was the result of a plaster job gone wrong that sprouted into a cow face that reminded me of Andy Warhol’s pink cow painting.

I may have been the only one who saw it that way, but given my fondness for cows, I never asked the repair man to come back and smooth out the ceiling. How could I when one pinkish ear was waving down at me? I took to waving good night to “Pinkie” as I fell asleep. We sometimes exchanged moos.

Sometime in the middle of the night, during Southern California’s now infamous hurricane-earthquake show, Pinkie uttered her last moo and collapsed onto the bedroom floor leaving a hole in the ceiling as well as my heart.

Preferring not to have her demise be in vain, I have pursued a relationship with her successor. If you can imagine anything being more unusual than a cow on your ceiling you might understand that it would be a movie screen. Mine was provided, unintentionally, by my daughter’s friend, Josh, one of those enviable people whose creative abilities carry over to fixing stuff.

After I babbled into Sara’s voicemail that my cow (I never told her that I had named it) had been felled by the rain, she texted back that help was on the way. About an hour later, Josh was climbing up a ladder borrowed from, and steadied by, my very helpful neighbor, Bud, a retired contractor, and they were talking roof speak.

In the triple-digit sunshine that graced us the day after the storm, Josh roamed around the roof with the same ease that I walk around my front yard. He shouted down some questions about the roof that I didn’t know the answers to, but Bud did, one of the values of living next door to someone for many years.

After Josh shoveled dirt and gravel away from the drains, and made a few observations I didn’t understand, he came inside to check out the ceiling. He had brought special sheeting and tape to cover the hole which he did with precision. Looking up at the neatly affixed black square I realized that it looked like a movie screen and my mind started creating scenes to run on it.

Now I can create new characters to talk to when I can’t sleep. I think my first movie will definitely star a cow named Pinkie.

Email patriciabunin@sbcglobal.net. Follow her on X @patriciabunin and PatriciaBunin.com