Cleaning Checks #MIM

That fresh scent of…

My roommates bought a sugar glider as a pet.  It’s a marsupial similar in nature to the flying squirrel.  If you’ve ever owned one of those, you know that they seem like a great idea at first until mating season.  Then the male will secrete a saliva and a hormone that marks his territory.  The smell is akin to the smell of dead meat, and so–as I was only vaguely aware of my roommates pet–that’s what I started looking for.

Our apartment house has a history of dead meat.  The previous owner of the house lives three states away and she checks the house to find out if there are any problems with it every three or four years accordingly.  She would care more, but the last time she came she found ten more tenants living in the house on mattresses in the living room than she had contracts for.  Though she did get rid of the house’s stowaway tenants, she’s since decided she’d rather not know what happens under this roof.

The contract I signed before moving in said that cleaning checks would happen every month.  I’m a somewhat clean person, so when I saw that this place would be clean at least once a month, I was satisfied.  But when cleaning checks actually came about the first month, I learned I was perhaps the only one in the house who took it seriously.  The previous—and then current—landlady certainly didn’t.

So, when the house sold to a new owner I voiced my excitement for cleaning checks.  The new owner was glad to see that one tenant in the house needed no prodding, and we had a cleaning check the first week upon her closing the deal.  My roommate Taylor was excited too—perhaps more so because with the closing, all of the other tenants on our floor moved out and left their kitchen cupboards full of free food.  But the refridgerator was scary.

We found green bags of ham from 2007.  I think Sam, from Green Eggs and Ham, would not have lived to finish his story had he tried it.  There was more too: two-year old mayonnaise, some stripey and freezer-burned meet that must have been chicken, and jars that could only be discerned as jam by their labels.

All in all, we threw away four trash bags of old food.  It took six black grocery bags to hold the non-smelling trash we found throughout the house, but we were mostly glad to get rid of the first four.  Within a few weeks, with a little daily effort, our floor of the house—the main floor—was clean enough to have guests over.

And then…mating season.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Commentary, Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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