Last week I was away from home for a couple of days. When I returned and opened the back door—it hit me!
The unmistakeable smell of a dead mouse greeted my return. (Anyone who has ever smelled one will know what I mean.) And sure enough, there was a deceased rodent in the trap that I keep set under the boot rack by the door.
The sneaky critter must have scurried into the welcoming warmth of the house when we were loading up the vehicles. I always shut the door quickly behind me to avoid such a happening whenever I venture into the garage, no matter how brief the trip, as a mouse only needs a nanosecond to take advantage of an open portal.
However, other individuals who reside in our home are not as vigilant. Since there are now only two of us living here, you can guess who that might be.
Since my husband was not home to dispose of the creature, I put on my gloves, emptied the trap and prepared it for further invaders with a dose of fresh peanut butter before resetting it. But that smell! It seemed to hang in the air. So I got out the disinfectant, washed the area thoroughly and sprayed a liberal amount of air freshener to combat the odour. But for the next few hours that smell seemed to haunt me.
It reminded me of another time a while back when a disgusting odour drove me crazy. Much like the other night, I was first alerted to a bad smell when I opened the back door. But that time the trap was empty and unsprung, plus there was no evidence of mouse activity anywhere in the house.
But the smell did not go away and with each passing day grew worse. It appeared to be coming from the basement, but despite a continued search, the origin of what had now become a stench lay undiscovered. In desperation I made my husband tear out the drywall under the basement stairs, convinced that some critter had managed to get in and had died there. After wrecking a wall, we once again came up empty-handed.
Certain that my husband was to blame for this fiasco, I berated him for leaving the door open and allowing a horde of mice (or worse) to invade our home, but I had no proof of such a happening.
By this time my stress level had turned me into an anxiety-ridden harpy and my sleep-deprived mind into a walking zombie. Then one day when I returned home from school, my husband was waiting for me with a knowing smile.
“I found the source of the bad smell,” he announced.
A week earlier I had picked up the half of a beef that we had purchased from a local meat supplier. I had hauled down the boxes and carefully piled the various cuts of meat into our deep freeze. That is, all except for one roast which had slipped down between the freezer and a cupboard. For the past week, a raw chunk of meat had been slowly deteriorating and rotting on our basement floor.
Some shame-faced apologies were offered to my husband. But the good news was that it wasn’t a mouse!
