Have you ever been in a place so dirty you couldn’t breathe? A place where a sneeze could kick up a huge cloud of dirt and dust? Has it ever been your job to clean such a disgusting place? During one smoldering summer day, that was my job.

My grandma had called earlier that week asking if my brothers and I wanted to work, with our cousin, at her house for a little money. We said we would and we would be there sometime later this week. I woke up early that morning wondering what job I would be assigned. Maybe I was going to mow her lawn or I was going to sweep her house, I found out later that day that I was very wrong. My mom drove us over to her house and talked with our grandma until we started working on our jobs. Grandma told us what to do, we started working, and my mom left. She split us off into two groups, my older brother and my cousin were to stain the deck and my twin brother and I were to clean out the shed next to the house.

As I walked over to the shed I was speechless. The shed is about seven feet tall, about five feet wide and about seven feet long. It was made out of wood, some of it rotting away, and the paint was red with a white trim around the edges like a barn. The paint was gone in some places and was peeling away from other places showing us how old this shed really was. We unlocked the door of the shed and saw what a massive job we had ahead of us. Inside the shed there were all sorts of items; there were fishing poles, a paddle for a row boat, a lot of pots, bags of an assortment of items, a weird blue lamp, a wheelbarrow, and two mini grills. Everything was covered in a layer of dirt and dust.

Before we started my grandma came over and stated, “Your job is to clean out this shed so I can go inside, with my asthma I cannot breathe in there”

I asked her, “Anything we need to know before we start cleaning this?”

“Yes” she replied “Do not sweep any of the dirt out of the shed, sweep it into garbage bags.”

“Why do we have to do that?” we questioned.

“As you can see right there,” she said as she was pointing at the floor of the shed, “Those green specks are mouse poison and if you sweep that out it would kill my plants.”

With the news about what we had to do, we put on some surgical masks, and we started working. Careful not to kick any of the few green specks we started moving stuff out of the shed. After we got all of the stuff out of the shed we called our grandma over to look over what she wanted and what she didn’t want. While she was looking around we started to sweep the dirt, dust, and mouse poison into a pile in the center of the shed. We got the vacuum and started to vacuum up when we heard a crash. It was the lamp, we left it on uneven ground and it tipped over. Luckily our grandma didn’t want it anyway. We cleaned all of it up and cleaned the whole shed to the point where you could finally see the floor. As we were putting stuff away a rug fell out of a black garbage bag. Curious about what it looked like we unraveled it, inside was a dead mouse, mouse droppings, and ripped up and almost totally destroyed rug. Grossed out by the incident we quickly put it away and threw it out.

With every thing cleaned and put away with we looked at the clock. That whole job had taken four hours to do. With our time running out we decided to go home. When we arrived I looked at my clothes I was covered with a layer of dirt almost as if I was part of the shed in the beginning. I quickly toke a shower, washed my clothes, and hoped nothing like that will happen again. If you didn’t learn anything from this story remember this, before you decided to do a job at least find out what your doing, or you may end up doing a job like I did.