V and I went out of town this weekend after a very busy Friday. We left Shaunsie home alone and had our own adventures, and wandered home yesterday evening. Mondays are one of my days to sleep in, so I didn't really venture into the kitchen until late this morning. And there was a smell. I mean, a Smell. Like a peach sat in a hot car for a few days, and then you put it on a plate in a small, closed, damp room. Only worse.
At first I thought I'd been watching too much CSI. I could hear Nick say to Warrick (because in my heart, Warrick isn't dead), "You smell that?" and Warrick raises his handsome eyebrow and knowingly mutters, "Decomp."
So I looked for the body. The three of us were accounted for, thankfully, and Seven was wandering around by my feet. Ah, the fish! Oh, poor fish. Wait, he's not dead. He was just sitting still. I checked the garbage disposal (ick), took out the garbage, opened and closed cupboards and the fridge, trying to figure out 1. what had died here and 2. where it was, exactly. My mind raced: we've never had mice in this house (knock on wood), and I hate mice with a white hot passion. (I may hate mice more than I hate squirrels. No, I only hate mice when they're in houses. I hate squirrels everywhere.) I swept under the stove. No corpse, but I found that old Martha Stewart's Halloween Issue I thought I'd left at Crystal's.
Then I started to get worried. Hallucinations of smells is a sign of a brain tumor, right? I mean if everything starts smelling like pickles, I'm probably gonna die. But this smell was clearly in the kitchen, somewhere between the sink and the trash, and it certainly didn't smell anything like pickles.
Finally, under a cream-colored kitchen towel on the counter above the dishwasher, I found the source. A baggie with just a bit of raw chicken, somehow left behind from Thursday's supper prep, hidden under the towel. Four days on my kitchen counter was plenty of time for terrible things to happen. I was totally relieved, and totally grossed out, and vowed to keep a cleaner kitchen. For now, I've got four scented candles and some incense going on in there, and I'm gonna go eat some pickles.
2 comments:
Ah, yes. I can't tell you how many times we've had to investigate smells in our kitchen, but at the Weatherby house the game is called, "Find That Funk."
I am very relieved for you that you found the source, because a few years ago, a mouse died inside one of our kitchen walls by the heating ducts, and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it short of knocking a hole in the wall. I still cringe when I think about the dessicated mouse in there.
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