Roofing

My right knee is the worst joint in my body. When ever it is submitted to bending beneath my 220 pounds, it cracks like breaking branch. No doctor has ever examined it, perhaps that should change. Perhaps a doctor should have been called on site four years ago, when I was lying on a porch roof all but crying. The porch roof was almost completely level, thankfully. But the roof that ascended from it was very steep, fourteen inches of rise for every foot of run.
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Moments before this scene I had been carrying bundles of shingles up the slope of the roof to the peak, using toe boards (spaced evenly every 3 feet and nailed to the roof perpendicular to its slope) to aid my shoe’s grip. The bundles of shingles weighed about sixty pounds each and my knees were doing all of the work in lifting the load of my weight combined with the wrapped asphalt. I would bend my knee, put my foot on the next toe board and lift the weight with a single leg’s strength. I had done this about six or seven times successfully, but this time my body failed.
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At the point I was using my leg to lift me; the knee failed, cracked and tore. I began sliding down the roof, and everything passed in an infinitesimal period of time. I had slid down the roof with shingles on my back and the toe boards had nearly ripped my shirt off during my descent. My chest consequently burned from the flesh that had been sanded off by the granular surface of the old shingles covering the roof. I was conscious on the porch roof thanking God I had not fallen to the ground. But my knee was twinged with an intense pain (ripped ligaments, no doubt) and my chest was bloody and burned.