An Ode To The Joy Of Spring Cleaning
… (Unless It’s Asbestos You’re Gleaning)
It’s nice here, when Spring’s in the air,
Birds singing in cottonwoods fair,
The weather is warming, garage sales are forming,
And kids still in school, or somewhere.
Now’s time to do what we’ve been meaning,
And tackle a little Spring cleaning.
And yes, while we’re at it, the basement has had it!
Remodeling’s the way we are leaning.
We took a sledgehammer to wall boards,
Avoiding all plumbing and all cords.
We hired our two nephews to clean up the refuse.
(We’re probably out of our gourds.)
While they were there, the two fellas
Got sloppy, and overly zealous.
While playing and humming, they damaged some plumbing,
And weren’t even going to tell us.
At least they did not come up bloody,
But they’d left the basement all floody.
The disintegration of pipe insulation
Left everything looking quite muddy.
Our anger eventually died out,
We finally got everything dried out.
We sent the boys home, and wrote up this poem,
And searched for a place we could hide out.
The family homestead, you see,
Was nowhere we wanted to be.
A giant dust cloud which no breathing allowed
Had formed from the dried-out debris.
A friend put us up, and he’d test us,
By saying “did you have asbestos?”
We stood there blank-staring, not knowing or caring,
Quite daft, as our friend had assessed us.
“But isn’t asbestos illegal?”
We asked, with a squirm and a wiggle.
“Not really,” he snorted, “They still can import it!”
“In products made with it!” he giggled.
We did some asbestos researching
And what we found out sent us lurching.
We could have asbestos! And it could infest us
With shards in our lung tissue perching!
That cloud in the house was a threat,
And could have those death shards, you bet.
That pipe-cov’ring foam, and more stuff in the home,
Could have it! We were not safe yet!
We hired a professional tester,
Who finds stuff like mold and asbester.
“The good news,” he said, “Is nobody is dead,”
“But I wouldn’t let this stuff fester.”
We soon got the news that we hated:
“Your place is contaminated.”
“But all is not lost – it’s well worth the cost,”
“To get your whole household abated.”
Asbestos Abatement we called,
Assuming we’d soon be appalled
When getting the bill – and while it ain’t nil,
It’s less than we figured on, y’all.
If you have asbestos, the answer:
Abatement is better than cancer!
So don’t hesitate, asbestos won’t wait,
You don’t want that stuff on your hands, sir.
You might see a need to do some Spring cleaning, but you won’t see whether you have a problem with airborne asbestos – it’s microscopic. So if, in the course of your cleaning, you end up with a cloud of suspicious dust, call your expert and attractive friends at Asbestos Abatement, Inc. We’ll take care of that ugly stuff, and you’ll be able to breathe a sigh of relief as fresh as that first Springtime breeze!
