Confessions of a chronic shed slob

MY KINGDOM for a Martha Stewart shed, for a Smith & Hawken potting table, a cream-colored pegboard with the perfectly hung tools, an enameled and labeled can with fluffy potting soil and an alphabetized seed file -- how I long to be as proper as the gardeners in magazines and on TV programs.

If I had a shed like that, my actual garden would have no problem this year acing the garden contests. But in my last shed inventory, the contents included Christmas tree ornaments of a festive but forgetful lodger who moved out in 1998, a Food 4 Less shopping cart filled with kinked and leaky hoses and broken sprinklers, a toilet with a cracked lid, sacks of concrete that set without ever having been mixed, mismatched curtain rods, rusting tomato cages, and all manner of paper files that became somehow hard to throw away.

How did this happen? After I moved into my house 10 years ago, I used the shed for random storage instead of as a dedicated work space. In went the notionally usable and fixable that would never be used or fixed: Worn-down brooms, hundreds of black nursery pots, dozens of cans of paint samples, petroleum gone to jelly for a mulcher that didn't mulch. The mulcher itself.

Once the shed got so full that I had to stop hoarding, I did what many gardeners do. I ignored it. Tools lived within an arm's reach of the door, so I didn't even have to enter the structure but could stand at the door and feel around for the shovel, rake or pick. The wheelbarrow found a new home around the side of the house. Hand tools moved into the house, where they got cleaned and greased more often.

Ivy enveloped the eastern side of the building, bougainvillea the west.

It took the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation to out-psych this slob. I called the city to schedule a "Bulky Item" pickup. But a cheerily sadistic operator demanded an itemized list of what I was going to donate to the dump before she would schedule me in.

Moving the junk was the easy part. Or so I thought. Had there been rat nests among the ivy shoots and filth swept up that day? That evening, I had all the early symptoms of hantavirus, which turned out to be identical to being sore after a hard day's work.