Family & Education
A windy day and it’s maggot alert
Judy Silkoff has owned a few succahs - but beware high winds and decaying vegetation
October 1, 2020 09:52
Judy Silkoff has owned a few succahs - but beware high winds and decaying vegetation
October 1, 2020 09:52I read recently that the average UK homeowner moves house four times after their first property. Given that Family Silkoff has lived in the same abode since 2000, I think we’re doing pretty well.
Our record on succah stability is rather less impressive. Given that a succah is, of course, intended only as a temporary abode, perhaps that’s understandable — but my parents have managed with the same basic succah structure for the past 43 years (minus some tarpaulin that went AWOL in the great hurricane of 1987). Where are we going wrong?
For the first five years of married life, we didn’t have a succah at all. With no garden, we simply didn’t have anywhere to put one. Handily, my parents had a habit of decamping to Israel for the festival, but not before they put the whole structure up, and handed us the keys to their abode for the duration.
Once we moved into our current house-with-garden, however, it was time to think about a succah of our very own. Thankfully, although the house came with shaky windows, electrical issues and some extremely archaic decor, it did have fully functioning indoor plumbing, and thus we didn’t need the ancient outhouse that still lived in the garden complete with crumbling, cobwebby lavatory. In a stroke of creative genius, we (and when I say we, I mean the builders) knocked out the loo, pulled off the roof, and replaced it with a retractable contraption — and lo, we finally had our own teeny, tiny, fully-formed succah! True, it was so small that the youngest child had to sit outside the door in her highchair, and we did share the space with some grumpy spiders, but it did the job. Until the year the husband forgot to lock the roof back down in place, some strong winds blew, and blew our lovely succah roof right away with it…
Next, we invested in a canvas model that was serviceable, but ugly. It lived in the loft and every year I trembled as the husband shlepped the poles down the loft ladder, down the stairs, through the living room and into the garden, taking out chunks of plaster and the odd lightbulb along with him. For the first few years of canvas succah, we had no roof at all — after every meal, we brought all the tables and chairs indoors in case it rained. This ensured that the furniture stayed dry, however, the schach (the leafy, bamboo-ey natural covering) never stopped dripping, slowly turning into compost over the course of the holiday. One memorable Shabbat lunch, a maggot dripped right into my bowl of cholent and, you guessed it, by the following year, the Silkoffs had a succah roof.
Three years ago, we made the biggest investment so far: one of the modular types, the advertisements for which the husband had been studying longingly for many a succah-season. “Just clicks together! So easy!” screamed the advertisements. This may be true for the spanner-wielding, burly DIY type. But my husband is a short, middle-aged, Ashkenazi school teacher, and even after enlisting the help of his equally short, equally Ashkenazi father (who is, by the way, a structural engineer), it took three days and nights of hard toil to get something resembling a succah standing in the garden. It was a miracle it stayed upright for the whole of Yomtov — but the one thing they didn’t put together was the roof (“there’s something wrong with it”, my father-in-law insisted), and I spent most of Yomtov examining my food for maggots.
These days, in the run-up to the High Holy Days, we secure the services of one of those spanner-wielding burly DIY types to come and put up our succah for us. It takes him 15 minutes, including the roof, which is, unsurprisingly, in perfect working order.
But the modular succah does have the habit of listing dangerously into the flower bed that sits directly behind it. I have regular visions of it somersaulting over the flower bed and right down the lawn, but so far, despite the fact that its jaunty angle makes chicken soup consumption rather precarious (solution: buy bigger bowls), it has always — just about — stayed upright.
I have concluded that house-buying and succah-buying have no direct correlation and I suspect that the modular succah will not be our last. As long as it comes with a roof, and the Burly Builder is around to do the hard work, I’m open to suggestions. Chag sameach!
