In Which Much Is Accomplished: View Into Our Shed

Warning: This tale is not for the squeamish! It includes details about a rodent zombie apocalypse, and its aftermath. Yes, you've been warned!

It was a task I will have to admit I had been dreading. In the high heat of summer, alas, the mice had taken over our shed. It began last week with the discovery of a Very Bad Smell which reeked to high heaven. Something had died in the shed, and last weekend's Saturday morning task (mainly MINE) was to tear apart as much of the shed as necessary to find and remove whatever had died in there.

In the process, which I wrote about in last Saturday's blip, I did discover one deceased mouse in an empty coffee pot. I buried it in the meadow. I also found a nest of three mice in a big flower pot, very much alive. One ran right at me (!!!!) and then disappeared behind a cooler on the floor. The other two, I removed and dumped out at the edge of our property, where they scurried away. I cleaned things up and tidied up the right side of the shed.

I hate to kill anything, but mice simply cannot live in the shed. Mice are incontinent, which means they pee and poo everywhere, creating very bad smells and unsanitary conditions. They also chew everything up, and they are vectors for disease and ticks.

Had they stayed out of the shed, we would have kept peace with the mice, but alas, that was not to be. So I set several traps, which I always tie off to something sturdy nearby: two in the rafters, one on the floor.

In the time since then, I've trapped out and removed several very healthy looking specimens. The traps dealt instant death, with no suffering, which is every real trapper's main goal.

When I checked my traps Wednesday morning, one of them had gone missing. Which meant one of two things: either I had a dead mouse somewhere in a trap in the shed. Or even worse, I had an alive, wounded, and still suffering mouse somewhere in the shed. The thought broke my heart.

The weather around here has been horrible lately: around 90 degrees F with about 90 percent humidity. It is the worst weather of the year for someone like me. I hardly go outside, except in the mornings and evenings. I just can't bear the heat.

But Wednesday morning before work found me sweating and miserable in the shed, tearing everything on the left side of the shed out, as that's where the trap had been: up in the rafters on the left. I worked on it for 10 minutes, went back inside the house. Did another 10 minutes, went back inside. Came out for another 20 minutes, went back inside. It was back-breaking work. Even worse, I came up empty-handed.

By then my husband was out of bed, so I told him what had happened. We HAD to find that trap! As I hopped in the shower, he took his turn at the shed. Just as I was leaving for work, he tossed the empty trap on the front porch. He had found it behind a small refrigerator in the left front corner of the shed. SUCCESS!

But alas, in our tearing everything apart, the shed was left in chaos. Everything was everywhere. It was a great big mess. I just couldn't bear to deal with it in the heat that evening when I got home from work. So I made a solemn promise to myself that first thing Friday morning, I would tear apart and set to rights the shed.

In the meantime, I reset the traps, just one in the rafters this time, and one on the floor. When I came in to check my traps on Thursday morning, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. There were tiny tufts of fur around the trap on the floor. If a mouse had become a suicide bomber, and exploded itself, that's what it would have looked like afterwards.

As I sadly surveyed the tiny mouse bits and the remaining entrails on the floor, I realized what had happened: I had caught a mouse in the trap, and another, ferocious mouse had EATEN the trapped mouse! It is my custom to write an email to my family most days. The title of that day's note was "the rodent zombie apocalypse has come!" YUCK! The mice were clearly out of control.

Thursday night, I woke up in the middle of the night sweating, dreading the task, actually fearing it. I knew that I would find lots of mouse dirt in the shed. I suspected that I would find more mouse nests. I worried that I would find worse. I knew it would be back-breaking work to remove everything from the left side of the shed and clean it all up and put it back. But that's how it is when you have a house: the only help that's coming is at the end of your own two arms!

So Friday morning found me out in the shed bright and early. With a bit of help from my husband (but not a lot), I removed everything from the left side of the shed and put it in the driveway, much like last week. It looked - again - like we were having a yard sale! Bicycles and old vacuums and chairs and plant pots and God Knows What. The thought running through my head: WHY DO WE KEEP ALL THIS CRAP?!!!???

I sweated and fumed, but I got it done. First task was to remove everything. Second task was to clean it all up. (Yes, I did find and remove a bunch more mouse nests; the degree to which they had infested the place was hard to believe. I will keep a closer eye on things forthwith.)

Third task was to decide what to pitch in the garbage. Fourth was to put all the remaining stuff back in some more organized fashion. This is a photo I took when I was done, just before I peeled off my filthy clothes and hopped in the shower.

It may not look like much, but this photo represents THREE HOURS of back-breaking, sweaty, horrible work. (Add that to last week's two-plus hours; I have to admit that I have never spent this much quality time in the shed before!) I am fortunate that early in life, I developed a high tolerance for annoying, tedious, mind-numbingly repetitive tasks. It has served me well in life, and it helped out a lot on this day.

To be fair, there were three bicycles still sitting behind me on the pavement when I took this photo, and they went in last. But I liked the way things looked: room to move around, everything clean and neat, like things with like. We even lit incense when I was done and now it smells pretty good in there.

By 11:30 a.m., we were in the shower. Shortly after noon, we were clean and freshly clothed and blow-dried. We hopped in my new car, and my husband treated me to a very nice lunch at Hoss's in town: sirloin tips with onions and green peppers and gravy, a baked potato with sour cream and butter, and a side salad with ranch dressing. Yes, those who work like fiends deserve to EAT!

And then we went home. And I opened the shed door and surveyed our handiwork. And I was pleased and proud. It was a task I had dreaded, but I DID it! I prevailed, with some help from my husband.

The shed is in as good a shape as it's ever been since I bought it in the fall of 2008, just after I got married and my new husband moved in. (Look to the middle right - you can even see the price tag, still on it.) I bought the shed as a place to store our extra stuff, upon the merging of our two households.

As the day wore on, I felt almost euphoric. Do you have any idea how GOOD it feels when you accomplish something you dreaded? Very good indeed! There are numerous organizing tasks INSIDE the house that I've been thinking about, but putting off. You know what: they all look like small potatoes now, next to this one. Perspective, I can has it . . . Oh yes, I've earned it the hard way.

So the lesson that I learned (or maybe re-learned) on this day was this: When push comes to shove, though I may dread it, and it may keep me up at night, in the end, I can Do the Hard Things. And whether you know it or not yet, I'll bet you can too.

So let's let this blip be a story about Dreading Something Awful But Getting It Done Anyway. Let it be a celebration of strength, and endurance, and fortitude. For when you do a Very Hard Thing, you learn that maybe you can do Even Harder Things when the time comes. Yeah, it's like that.

The soundtrack is a Bon Jovi tune that makes me feel strong when I sing it. So let's put it right here as I close the shed doors behind me and walk away: Bon Jovi, with It's My Life.