Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Explanation #1

“I know what dead mouse smells like, and that’s dead mouse.”
For those of you who are squeamish at this sort of thing, I suggest you don’t read the rest of this entry. Even thinking back to this sometimes makes my stomach churn.

I have heard that a smell can trigger a strong emotional memory. Like when you smell a particular food cooking you remember being a child and your mother’s cooking. Certain colognes trigger memories of my old boyfriends. And for some reason, I remember the smell of a dead mouse. I guess if you’ve ever had one, you wouldn’t forget it.

My cat is great at catching mice. I am not worried about the little creatures now that Gracie is around. She will spend most of the night waiting for a mouse to come out of its hiding place, and then the rest of the night playing with the terrified mouse.

But one mouse got away.

We started smelling it in the bedroom. It was enough to make you sick, if you thought about it too much. I spent two evenings cleaning the room, searching under the beds, even under the mattresses to find the source of the smell. My husband suspected the smell came from a dirty diaper that escaped and was hiding somewhere. But I knew better. “I know what dead mouse smells like, and that’s dead mouse.”

Since we don’t have a washing machine or dryer at home, I have to take the laundry to a Laundromat. I have huge duffle bags specifically for that purpose.

While searching for the stinking dead mouse, I packed up the laundry. But I never found the dead mouse. Interesting enough, the smell lessened. I didn’t go away completely, but it wasn’t so nauseating.

You guessed it, the dead mouse was in the laundry. Imagine my shock when unloading the laundry and a dead mouse fell out. Fortunately, I am not squeamish about such things, and was able to discreetly use a plastic shopping bag to pick up and throw away the poor creature. No one at the laundry knew.

I was glad that we finally found it. I was glad that I was right about the source of the smell, but I was not happy that the cat let this one get away.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Back in my days of living in Pennsylvania, I lived in this 160+ year old house and only in the summer would a mouse crawl into the wall and die. So for about two weeks there would be this smell that I came to call "The Angle of Death". Nothing like dead mouse smell!

Anonymous said...

I would flip out!! Glad you didn't get freeked out over it :)