Bought this old beater of a house a few years back, or more than a few years, ten maybe. more. Foreclosure. I looked at it as an investment, winter work for the employees. No stairwell to the second floor, the downstairs was trashed, the roof was good, furnace worked, but it was going to be work. Outside, there was no garage, but someone had made a shed that looked like nothing more than half a dozen sheets of plywood nailed together at the corners, the wood blackened, a door half-assed hung, warped. Inside, garbage, ground to ceiling. Remember the song? Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout...would not take...the garbage out. Sarah's brother lived here. I think the garbage was the result of many of the communities going to "village" garbage bags, color-coded, so forth so on.
We're talking wet garbage...bringing back fond memories of the 32nd Street Naval Station and the voice on the 1MC, "Wet garbage!" Two guys low on the totem pole would grab a galvanized garbage can from the mess deck, the can loaded with leftovers. Swill. Do all they could to carry it off the brow of the ship and dump it into a truck that made its way up the pier. Hog feed, my guess.
Same with this shed. Is that macaroni? Or maggots? Hard to tell...much of the macaroni was still wet, fluid. Had a pickup with wood sides that I used as a dumpster. Time the shed was empty the truck was full up, to the gills. Didn't see any rodents but maybe they were hunkered in there somewhere, hidden in a moldy roast or something. Can't remember what the tipping charge at the waste station was, took the better part of day to shovel and pitch-fork the garbage out.
Or too...there was that time the manager at this apartment complex enlisted me to crawl through the attic spreading rat poison pellets, summer, attic, hot, dusty. You hear this scrambling, rustling, you're lying on a plank that runs the middle of the trusses, particles of fiberglass insulation floating in the air. Replaced some nasty toilets, too. Don't you people ever clean! Gives ya the heebie jeebies, that pungent aroma so thick it adheres to your skin and you need to scrape it off with a knife?