The rods on the roof

Drive through almost any village in Upper Egypt and you will see houses with steel rods sticking out of the roof.

The family lives on the ground floor, perhaps the first as well. The rods are waiting for the floor a son will add when he marries. Some of those houses have looked that way for a very long time.

Nobody in the family calls the house unfinished. It is the house. It became the house the day the first slab went down and someone said this one is ours.

Most worthwhile things begin like that. They exist from the moment someone names them and starts, long before they are done, and many of them are never entirely done.

There are two ways to miss this. One is to wait until you are certain you can finish before you begin, so the first slab is never poured. The other is to pour first slabs everywhere, then lose heart when the walls get difficult and drift off to the next plot.

The families in those villages tend to avoid both. They begin with what they can manage, live in it, and add a floor when life asks for one.

A working life looks less like a list of duties than a row of things that were started and then actually stood up. Not finished in the sense of perfect. Finished in the sense of standing, lived in, strong enough to carry the next floor.

The rods on the roof are not a sign that something is incomplete. They are a sign that someone is still building.