The Return, pt. 1

So, on February 3rd, I returned to the school building.  This might sound silly from a woman pushing fifty, but February 2nd is my birthday. After eleven months of no in person teaching, did I really have to be at work at seven o'clock in the morning the following day, wearing hard pants and shoes?  Couldn't they have picked SOME OTHER DAY?

I have been assigned a new trailer.  I wasn't happy about that, either.  I know that beggars can't be choosers and that last year was the first time in years that I had had my own classroom, but jesus, it took nearly a week to clean out the last one and I really wasn't looking forward to doing that again.  Only to be moved a few months later, I assume, and continue to clean up the filthy school one room at a time.  

I parked the car and walked into the lobby of the school, as instructed, pulled my phone out and clocked in, then walked back to the parking lot and moved our car to the parking lot next to the new trailer.  It's a double-wide and I have the back half.  I really liked my single-wide, no sharing walls with neighbors, I found myself thinking as I walked up to the new one, while gazing at the old one.  I opened the door.

There was shit everywhere.  Shelves and drawers full of materials, boxes, papers, old textbooks.  The board still had random stuff written on it from last March.  The marker had become nearly permanent.  There were about thirty desks and chairs piled up against the walls, limiting the space that anyone could even move around in.  It has carpet.  Carpet is dirty by nature and I knew that in my single-wide no one ever did the floor, so I brought a broom and did it myself.  Bring a vacuum is more complicated.  It was filthy.  There were dead roaches and hornets everywhere.  Rocks and dust and broken crayons, ground into the carpet.  Black weird cockroach dust all over the carpet and the windowsills.  The blinds were covered in filth.  I carefully set my arms full of stuff down, not even sure where I would want to put it.  Then, I looked at the COVID "sanitation station" that we had been told would be ready and waiting as soon as we returned to the buildings.  There were two rags, a container of wipes that I wasn't sure if were for surface or human use, some half used rolls of toilet paper and a can of air freshener from Dollar Tree.  It was half empty.

I stood there in disbelief and I thought long and hard about getting back in the car and simply driving away.