Last week I produced that last special effect right in Fly Creek, right in my own back yard. Except that I wasn't outside, watching the boiling cloud. I was in the middle of it.

My adventure came while cleaning the garage. That followed, as so much has recently, from our straightening up the place for the approaching wedding reception. (Only weeks away!) Before tackling the garage, I'd already de-moused Anne's garden shed; her husband had stupidly left a twenty-pound bag of grass seed in there over the winter.

Mice, evidently a regiment of them, had busily converted all that seed into twenty pounds of black droppings, scattering them all through the shed. And, besides trashing the place, they'd also come to think of it as their own. This spring, Anne would step inside to find three or four mice, guards, I guess, lined up on a top shelf to chatter insults at her.

After I had shoveled out all that reprocessed grass seed, I replaced it with a liberal scattering of emerald-colored anti-mouse pellets. It was gratifying to see the fresh droppings gradually turn a bilious green, then diminish in number, then vanish. As did the mice.

That job done, I turned to the garage. It houses Anne's car, my rusting truck, a red canoe, file cases, lots of tools, and two chest freezers. The last are full of vegetables, fruits, and meat, all locally raised. That makes us feel healthy, and virtuous, too.

The double garage also housed what I guess, in retrospect, was about twenty or thirty tons of greasy dirt, grit, and dust. That may be exaggeration; but the place was truly a dump, overdue for a good cleaning by seven years or so. The floor, which of course is concrete, looked to be dirt. And every flat surface was layered with more dust than was mad, jilted Miss Havisham's wedding banquet table. (This summer, treat yourself to "Great Expectations." She's lurking there to scare you.)

The day that I was assembling shovels and push brooms for the garage job, my neighbor and buddy Wolfgang Merk pulled into the driveway. When I said what I was reluctantly about to start, Wolf said, "Hey, there's an easier way." Wolf explained that every year he cleans his big garage/workshop in one fell swoop-with his leaf blower. He just fires up the blower, starts at the back of the garage, and blasts all the debris forward and out the doors.

What a great idea! What a labor saver! And so down to Wolf's garage we went, and back I came with his leaf blower. I gassed it up outside my garage, put on a face mask and ear plugs, headed deep into the garage. There I cranked the motor to life and pointed the muzzle down.

That's when the simulated mine explosion occurred. Wolf's idea, it turns out, is a great one for a year's worth of garage dirt. But tackling seven years' worth makes for an Oklahoma dust storm. From outside the garage, it must have looked as if the place had blown up. Inside, in the middle of it, I felt like a ladybug sucked into the vacuum-cleaner bag.

In a half-crouch, I worked grimly, blowing tsunami waves of gray dust towards the doors-or where I thought they were. For, despite the mask, I was half-blind, my eyes running and smarting. Grit stung my forehead, piled up behind my ears. Pompeii must have felt like that, just before the really heavy stuff began to fall.

Halfway through the job, I shut off the blower and stumbled out of the garage. Anne was out there, standing at a distance from the billowing cloud. "How's it going?" she asked.

Well, how to answer that?

"You should look at yourself," said Anne, smiling. I peeled off the goggles. My clothes, hands, and arms were a uniform dirty gray, like a bit player's in "The Mummy's Revenge." And when I glanced at the mask in my hand, I saw what had caused at least part of my blindness. Its lenses were dust-gray, too.

My bride, bless her, offered to take over the job at that point. But I strapped on mask, re-plugged my ears, and plunged back into the cloud. Ten minutes later the air began to clear; I could see what I was doing. And fifteen minutes later I staggered out again, the job done.

"Strip on the back porch," said Anne, always practical. I did so and padded upstairs to the shower, foolishly glancing into the bathroom mirror. Same aging body, of course, but now with gray mummy hands and arms, and with a face gray except for where the mask had fit. That part looked normal, except for the bleary red eyes. I don't know when a shower has felt so good.

I told this story to Karl Loos, the bride-to-be's father; he and his wife had come from Boston to help the couple with arrangements. Karl had his own story, a great one.

Earlier in the spring he had got out his own leaf blower, stored since the fall. Outside his garage, he yanked the cord on the blower. It roared to life-and launched, over his lawn, an entire mouse nest and its residents. Squatters, they'd moved into the blower's tube for the winter. What an eviction notice!

"I felt bad laughing," said Karl, "but I couldn't help it." Hey, who could? I'm having fun just thinking of that starburst of shocked Boston mice. Those trespassers were kin to the ones who trashed Anne's shed. As the song says, "They had it coming."

Well, I survived my own explosion. It's good to be in clean clothes and my normal color again. But, a week later, I'm still grinding grit between my teeth.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. He can be found on the web at JimAtwell.com.