A Blast From the Past

This is an article I wrote for the paper in February 2005. I still get comments on it occasionally even though it has been nearly five years since it was published.

THE MEMORY LINGERS ON

(….and on and on)

We had an interesting day at our house last weekend (January 29)—or at least I did. I call it that for lack of a better description.

I had planned for several days to leave for Atlanta that particular morning but the winter storm that slammed most of Georgia with a thick coat of ice made me reconsider.

I was disappointed and aggravated too because I had to postpone my trip and was not going to be able to spend much time with my children. Between roofers hammering on our house for most of the week and discovering the freezer had died and left me with a chest full of rotten food, I was more than ready for a break.

I am truly glad now that I did not leave home at the time I originally intended to do so.

While I am not saying that God brought the ice storm just to keep me home, I do feel He had a hand in saving me from what surely would have been a catastrophe. Maybe He felt sorry for me after the freezer calamity but I am thankful, nonetheless.

Knowing what I would have found when I returned home on Monday, I have no reservations in saying I would have had to move out of the house for quite a while if I had left on Saturday as planned.

It’s funny now but I can assure you, it was definitely not very funny then—at least the preliminary part was not.

My husband and children always joke that I can smell things when no one else does. They joke about birddog noses, etc. but it is often true even if they do ignore me when I complain. Bo rarely ignores me in these instances but even if he does, he usually respects my “scents-ability,” and wisely doesn’t dispute it when I say something stinks.

For most of Friday, I had complained that something smelled funny in our bedroom but I couldn’t find anything that could be creating the problem. Not surprisingly, Bo swore he couldn’t “smell a thing.”

Late that evening, I started to retire for the night when my olfactory senses were criminally assaulted at the bedroom door. Since it was after midnight and Bo was comfortably ensconced with tons of covers in his favorite recliner, I retreated to the den for the night.

Let me note here that he sleeps in his chair when he has breathing problems or, as in this case, an injured shoulder kept him from lying down. (It is essential to the story to explain this, especially as his shoulder was acting up and he had spent the past couple of nights there.)

The next morning, I told him we had to find whatever was stinking up the house. His sense of smell is notoriously bad but by then even he acknowledged he could smell it “a little.” As nasally impaired as he is, I knew if he could smell it, then it was every bit as awful, if not worse, than I first thought. He halfway looked around but soon left for work, leaving me alone with the stink-detective job.

I searched everywhere I thought it might be coming from as well as some places I didn’t, but no luck. I even got down on the floor with the flashlight and looked under the bed because our Jack Russell Terrier had brought a dead bird into the house earlier in the week. He tends to do this occasionally this time of year when large numbers of Goldfinches winter at our feeders, so it would not have been a shock to find one under there with his tiny feet turned up.

Nothing there but some old shoes and even my feet don’t smell that bad!

I kept going back to the recliner where Bo slept because it seemed stronger in that area but I still could not find the source. I picked up the throws and blankets he keeps there but they seemed okay, no obvious evidence in sight. By that time, I was beginning to doubt my own abilities a bit, but not enough to think I was imagining something that malodorous.

I Lysol™ed everything in the bedroom and saturated Bo’s chair and covers more than once. By then, I was burning more candles than certain church services do, trying to get rid of, or at least mask the smell.

When Bo came home for lunch, I told him I was sure that whatever it was had to be coming from somewhere around his chair because it was really strong in that area. Again, he swore he had not smelled anything until that morning and all he could smell now was candles and fabric spray.

After he went back to work, I decided to wash the blankets he had been using even though I didn’t believe they were the culprits. The spraying and candles had helped, but my stomach was still doing cartwheels every time I went near the bedroom and I was desperate enough to try anything by that time.

I took all the covers off the chair and found nothing. I looked over and under the chair again and found nothing more than the noxious scent itself. Then, I removed the beach towel Bo keeps spread over the seat of his chair.

On the seat, underneath the towel, was a very dead and very ripe Goldfinch. S/he was also very flat because Bo had been sitting on him for at least one night, and probably more.

When I uncovered the poor creature, the odor hit the room full blast. Believe me, it could easily have gagged a mule with a strong stomach.

In the meantime, our angelic pup was watching very placidly as I alternately wretched, threatened, and complained vividly. The way he watched so intently as I spent more than half a day searching should have told me he was at the bottom of this even if past experiences hadn’t.

He didn’t move an inch as I put the bird in a bag and took him out to the trash, not even when I dropped the poor thing in the process. When I got back inside though, this dog had gone somewhere else in the house and brought out another dead Goldfinch and laid him neatly in the middle of our den rug.

I guess he figured if I could find one he had hidden that well, he would just give me the other one. Thank goodness for that!

I still take a test-sniff when I come home though.

And I still pat the recliner seat occasionally—just in case.

This mischievous canine has lived with us most of his nine and a quarter years and we will keep him, but I am considering closing up his doggy door if he keeps hiding his dead bounty in the house. I am also considering having Bo’s sinuses Roto-Rooted™!