Please read this...An untimely visit from Gods of Stinkiness

You may have noticed that a photograph does not accompany this week's colyum, as has become the norm. That's mainly because any photograph which might have appeared would be, well, in a word, disgusting.

As you may know, we live in an old house. We think that the original part of our humble abode dates to the 1870s. Over the years, various additions were made.

When we moved into the house, way back in the day, we quickly learned that it had what The Other Half liked to refer to as "character," which, during the first couple of months in our new home, sweet home, involved a waterfall in the kitchen. The waterfall became a veritable River Styx which ran into a giant hole under the kitchen which I am pretty sure was the entrance to gates of Hades.

I'm guessing that the Netherworld was the home of the Gods of Stinkiness who paid us a rather unanticipated, and unwelcome, visit...just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday.

As near as I can tell, the Gods of Stinkiness must have sacrificed a creature of some sort or another in the space under our house. 

The result, as you might guess (or, if you have had a similar experience, you might actually know) was an odor which did not remind one's sniffer of pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce or a turkey roasting in the oven.

This was the second time in 2016 that some sort of creature had met its end under our house. Same thing happened during the summer, when we could open the windows. That's a little harder to do this time of the year.

Many years ago, as I think I've mentioned before, we had a situation which involved a rather large rodent which crawled under our house to meet its maker. This was discovered on a rather warm Father's Day. The father of the house (that would be yours truly) celebrated the special day by crawling around in the crawl space under our house to find, and remove, one of the most disgusting things that I think I've ever seen.

We did our best to find the source of the most recent malodorous odor. Our search, however, was to no avail. It seemed like the source may have been in one of the corners. Or, maybe in another one of the corners. Or, maybe, somewhere else. Who knows?  I did determine that we sure have a lot of stuff in our basement, which, at least in our old house, is not so much of a basement as it is more of a storm cellar. 

In order to cope with the sweet aroma, I did a bit of a search online for something along the line of "how to remove the odor of a dead mouse in a house," which came up with about a billion results, as well as a story written by Dr. Seuss which I did not know about.* Maybe not quite that many. But there were a lot.

Turned out that lots of folks have had the same experience. Basically, I learned that we pretty much were going to have to wait for the situation to resolve itself. A week. Six weeks. The 2016 presidential election. The Other Half, who takes a much a calmer approach to such challenges, suggested that we could do something about the odor, and it would go away in a week, or, we could wait patiently, and the odor would go away on its own in a week. I am glad she is so wise.

I did go to the store and look for some "organic" cleaning products, which cost an arm and a leg. Just as an aside, I still haven't figured out why products with the words "organic" or "natural" on the label cost so much more than just plain old stuff.  

One solution did arise on Thanksgiving Day itself. Turned out that the wonderful aromas of the many goodies which we cooked for the holiday feast, including cranberries, pumpkin, dressing, sweet potatoes and a turkey, did the job. 

(A cranberry scented candle which we picked up during our big Black Friday shopping excursion also helped. Our shopping adventure, by the way, involved a walk downtown, where we ended up spending about fifteen bucks.)

The situation has indeed been getting better. I guess the good thing is that the sacrifice made under our house by the Gods of Stinkiness did not involve a hippopotamus or rhinoceros, 'cause that would have just been preposterous...

(*I made this up. Dr. Seuss did not write any stories about dead mouses in houses, or even dead mices in hices. Well, I don't think he wrote any stories like that.)

The Gazette-Democrat

112 Lafayette St.
Anna, Illinois 62906
Office Number: (618) 833-2158
Email: news@annanews.com

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