Unless We’Re In Tacoma, Something Smells Funny
Have you ever had a conversation in your house that goes something like this?
“Do you smell that?”
“No.”
“You don’t smell it?”
“No.”
“I’m smelling something. There’s something in this room.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does it smell like?”
“I don’t know. Something bad.”
(Sniffing) “I’m serious. I really don’t smell anything.”
“Come over here. I’m smelling it right here.”
(Comes over) “No, I still don’t smell anything.”
“Maybe it’s nothing. Well, as long as you don’t smell it, then I’m not going to worry about it.”
“Yeah. If it’s something, it’ll get worse. And then we’ll know it.”
“I’m thinking now that it’s my imagination.”
(Long pause as both continue reading. Finally, the non-smeller looks up and says,) “It’s not your imagination. I think I smell it, too. There IS something.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Something bad.”
(Both commence to walking around living room, bending down, sniffing into corners, sniffing under couches).
“Whoa boy. Here we are.”
Over at my house, nothing good ever comes from a “Whoa boy, here we are.” It is always, as we had predicted, “something bad.” Generally, this consists of formerly living creatures that our cats have brought in the house to play with. Sometimes, it consists of formerly living creatures that I have brought into the house to play with, such as two ripe Hungarian partridge skins (for tying flies).
Occasionally, it is a charming yet pungent surprise.
Once, when I got down on all fours to sniff under the couch, I was hit with a wave of pure nausea that almost made me pass out. Obviously, something feline had been hanging out under the couch, but our own two cats are housebroken. When I looked back at them accusingly, they looked at me with utter disdain.
More sniffing revealed the culprit. A completely strange cat was backed into a corner behind the couch, staring at me in raw terror. I immediately deduced that this cat had been under the couch for many days, because the area surrounding the cat smelled so rank, it had those little wavy lines radiating up from it that you see in comic strips.
As it turned out, this cat had come in our cat door five days earlier, had engaged in a tussle with our cats and then couldn’t figure out how to get out. So it proceeded to cower under the couch until its presence was impossible to conceal.
When I moved the couch and opened the front door, that cat shot out of our house as if twanged from a crossbow. Within seconds, the cat was a receding dot in the distance. The cat’s aroma, however, lingered pensively in the living room for months.
Recently, we have been having that “do you smell something?’ conversation more often. The stray dog we took in, Snug, has turned out to be slightly less than housebroken. So we have spent an inordinate amount of time on hands and knees, delicately sniffing rugs for what may or may not be bad smells. This should be a simple task, but it is not.
For one thing, everyone has a different capacity for detecting smells. I’m convinced that if a massive natural gas leak ever occurred in our house, one of us would be frantically dialing 911 while the other would be going, “What? That’s only the onions from yesterday.”
However, that doesn’t scare me as much as the other problem, which you might call “stink familiarity.” This is the well-known syndrome that occurs when you are immersed in a bad smell for too long. Pretty soon, you don’t notice it anymore. This is why people who live in Tacoma, for instance, are prone to saying, “Smell? What smell?”
So if you become less than diligent about detecting bad smells in your house, pretty soon you will become accustomed to them and your house will smell exactly like the house of an eccentric cat-lady who has little wavy lines emanating up from her roof.
The only solution is to keep your nose constantly on alert. When someone in your house says, “Do you smell that?”, you must pay attention. Some strange cat might be under your couch, and let me tell you something, you don’t want to get accustomed to that smell.