Trash

Yesterday I finally set up my trash service.

Life is astronomically more expensive renting a house outside the village limits than renting an apartment in the city. There are a lot more little tasks that you have to accomplish on your own as well. Trash service is one of them. But as I'd accumulated quite a pile (I can be a right pig when the depression bogs me down), I decided it was time.

Setting up trash service, in my mind, involved dragging the two-ton garbage bin that had been lurking behind the garage, filled with strange things like hoses and sheets of plastic, and, presumably, anvils, up to the road. My shoulders are telling me today that this was a stupid thing to do; but I'd rather hear it from my shoulders than my back, which seems to be reasonably content, so all is well.

The former tenants of my humble abode were horrifyingly dirty. I still stumble across their leavings in unexpected places and have to stifle a gag from time to time. When I first moved in, I spent a good day and a half getting the cupboards and drawers into a state habitable by my measuring cups and dry goods. They all brimmed over with ancient flaky pellets of what looked to be either cereal or hamster food topped with mouse droppings. I vacuumed them out before practically unscrewing the bottle of the Antibacterial 409 and pouring it over their floors. I also found keys, sticky pennies, dog licenses, bottle caps, and other assortments of weird and nauseating junk.

The cupboard above the table, which could accommodate a football player curled in the fetal position, and which serves as my pantry, was the worst. I swept boxfuls of what can only be termed filth from it. The best that I could tell was that the filth comprised mainly chewed-up pieces of cardboard and sawdust, but that was only a vague guess. And when I say swept, I mean with a broom. The Dyson couldn't even manage it.

So my move-in was interesting. There's other stuff they left that I don't know about, mostly because I refuse to. I won't go into the basement, which contains scary and lurking bits of large machinery that stopped working decades ago and blankets of masterpiece cobwebs that rival the ones draped all over Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I avoid the corners of the garage. And I've skirted that garbage can, which looks like the Jetsons had a cleaning day and decided to toss their robot.

I don't know what those freaky weirdos were up to in that house. All I know about them from the landlord was that they lived like that, with two enormous dogs (who left their smell embedded in the carpets and their toothmarks on the baseboards) and an infant.

Up till now I've been little more than faintly nauseated and scornful of them; but now, at the onset of spring, when a young woman's fancy turns to thoughts of cleaning, I'm getting angry. Anger is one of the most useful emotions in the human range, I've found. It's motivating. It's stimulating. It crushes ordinary inhibitions. So getting angry with the last tenants is my way of rolling up my mental sleeves to pitch myself wholeheartedly into the work of eradicating any proof of their prior residence in my house. Time to get rid of the Filth Ghosts once and for all.