My grandmother has a shed. She keeps garden supplies and tools inside of it. It's not very big at all-maybe 10 foot by 10 foot. When my grandfather was alive and still had chickens (only for the eggs-Grandpa was too much of a softie to use his birdies for meat), the shed was their house. As a small girl, I used to go and find the eggs from the chickens so that Grandma could wash them and put them in the fridge, and I used to go to the big container in the garage and get feed for the chickens.
However, that was then. This is now. Grandpa and the chickens are long gone. The shed is now a garden shed. And today, Grandma wanted the shed clean.
Now to me, a clean shed would have meant something along the lines of A) removing all the objects from the shed B) sweeping/vacuuming the floor C) putting the objects Grandma wants back into the shed D) shutting the door and forgetting about whatever you just did.
Grandma's idea was a lot different.
A) Remove objects (Okay, that one was obvious)
B) SCRUB THE CEMENT CLEAN! (My extremely sore muscles attest that I'm not kidding about this. For those of you who have never cleaned rough cement it is very, very hard to do, partially because this cement was probably never meant to be cleaned as it was the base of a chicken coop. It has never been sanded smooth, so it has a rough texture that grabs dirt. This might have been the first time in its life (15 plus years?) it had been cleaned. Once I had vacuumed up the loose dirt and scrubbed the surface with a brush to get the dirt UP out of the microscopic pits in the floor, I also had to take a rag to it to get the now loose dirt off the floor.)
C) Watch Grandma rip out the chicken wire that Grandpa had stapled over the lone light bulb, then take first a screwdriver to the wall to remove the holder for the wooden board holding the light, proceed onward with a saw and then when that didn't work, a knife/hammer combination to remove the board that the light was strung through. And then she restrung the light on its wires and put it back up on the wall.
My grandmother is 83 and could probably bite nails in half if she wanted to.
She scares me sometimes.
Continuing on:
D) Scrub out the old feed box (this meant removing the decade-old caked sawdust from the bottom. Fun!)
E) Grandma scrubbed the window in the back. I vacuumed and scrubbed the upper shelf (lady beetle hell), and also sucked up cobwebs.
Then once all that rigmarole was done, Grandma cleaned her garden tools (this I understood-dirt left on them over winter will make them rust) and we put the stuff back in the shed. We plunked bags of potting soil back onto the clean floor. If they leak, I am NOT going to be the one scrubbing up the dirt.
Job done, I go home, right?
Wrong.
Grandma had more for me to do today...namely, cleaning up those dead plants piled up in the garden weeks and weeks ago.
So, I grabbed a recently-polished pitchfork and piled slimy, moldy, rotten plants into the wheelbarrow so she could take them out and dump them in the copse in back of the garden. When they didn't come off the fork nicely, fingers were the only recourse.
(Does Mike Rowe need an assistant? Because those jobs he does can't be nearly as bad as handling a long wet rotten moldy gushy slimy tomato vine that really should have hit the compost heap a month ago.)
Grandma also wanted the vacuum cleaned out. Some of the lady beetles I'd sucked up before were still ALIVE in the machine. Grandma dumped the lot out in a piece of newspaper and stuffed the whole thing, living bugs and all, into the woodstove.
And then we went and got logs from the woodshed and put them in the wheelbarrow, wheeled them up to the steps and hauled all six of them down the stairs.
And we had to find a spot for the wheelbarrow in the garage. There wasn't one, so Grandma moved some stuff and I shoved the riding mower forward a few feet so the wheelbarrow could fit behind it. Then we shut that garage door and went to put all the stuff from the house we'd used (vacuum, brooms, brushes, rags, and some other things) away.
THEN we were done.
But only after I had pulled EVERY, SINGLE, muscle group in my body past its scream point. I haven't pushed myself that hard since I got the fibro, and the way I feel now would be why.
Recall, if you can, the first time you went skiing? Recall the day AFTER you hit the slopes when you felt like the slopes were hitting back?
That's sort of what it feels like (maybe times two?), save for the fact that I'll have the pain a couple of extra days because fibro makes muscles overly sensitive to strain and tension. When I overdo as I have, I may hurt for about 4 or 5 days. Worse if it rains or threatens to.
Bending at the waist is very painful right now, lifting my legs up and into the car was awful, and my upper neck and back feel like when I hit that kid on the sledding hill (dummy was walking up the down slope and I smoked him at about ten miles an hour on a plastic sled (going in the right direction for once and look where it got me.) He got blown one way and I got thrown in another. I had the wind knocked out of me and couldn't lift my arms above my head for a week.)
I'm on a lot of ibuprofen right now so that I can sleep tonight, otherwise I'll be spending my night shifting around in bed and raining down curses on my grandmother for making me SCRUB A GARDEN SHED'S CEMENT FLOOR.
Good thing I probably won't have to do it again. I'm making myself scarce next year when she starts mentioning cleaning the shed.
Ta,
Bec
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