A Very Dirty Job

Two or three times in your life you encounter an odor so foul that it doesn't seem right that such a smell should exist. Today was one of those days.

Kris was out to pick up Mira from her art class this morning and I was getting ready to mow the lawn in the backyard, and I heard a pickup backing up on the other side of our block, behind us and one house up -- this is the little house that has been vacant and foreclosed since the old man who lived in it died two years ago.

As I went on mowing the lawn, at random times I seemed surrounded by this foul stench -- vaguely similar to fresh doggy doo if held one inch from your nostrils, but more pervasive, seeming to surround me in the backyard every time the wind blew a certain way.

I became suspicious that it had something to do with the activity at the vacant house. Curiosity got the best of me, so I wandered around the fence out back and across the alley to see what was going on, and there I found two exhausted-looking fellows standing by a truck, with a big basement freezer loaded onto the back of it.

They explained that the house had finally been bought despite its shabby condition, but that the buyer would not accept it with the freezer in it, so these two unfortunate souls were hired to remove it for the sum of $500. I say unfortunate because this freezer had apparently sat, closed, but not plugged in, in this house, with FISH inside it. For how long it was unplugged I don't know. But it's a safe bet those fish had been dead longer than the old man and it is probably safe to say that it was unplugged for at least a year.

Both men agreed that this was the single most repugnant job they'd been on and that for $500 it was not worth it. As they were talking, one of them was duct-taping the lid of the freezer shut in some sort of futile effort to contain the horrible stink, afterward spraying his arms with disinfectant, while his partner muttered something about burning the clothes they were wearing.

That smell lingered around the block for hours afterwards. The afternoon's heavy rainstorm finally brought a cleansing relief. A very big stink that was.