The Stench

I ended the stench today.

The stench had started on Labor Day. I noticed it soon after L. had left to go shopping with her friend at Little Five Points (and had also exited my life, as I later discovered). But the stench was no symbolic or existential odor, but a very real, sharp, penetrating and unpleasant smell I noticed in the master bathroom soon after she had walked out.

The master bath is also the master closet, and the stench at first smelled like an extremely nasty pair of smelly socks. I checked the laundry basket for the offenders, but found nothing. I then went around sniffing everything I could think of - bath towels, the toilet, the closets, even the shower drain. No luck. The source of the stench could not be found. In any event, I went ahead and ran everything I could think of through the laundry.

But, meanwhile, L. had a stench of her own. The rain from Hurricane Francis came leaking through her ceiling, which is odd because she doesn't live on the top floor of her apartment building, and had soaked her carpet. The maintenance folks repaired the leak, but on Saturday, when she and I went to dinner at Sotto Sotto, she thought that the cats had decided to start peeing on her carpet. Her whole apartment smelled like cat urine. Why the cats had chosen that time to stop using their kitty litter box was anybody's guess, but she applied some carpet cleaner and the smell soon abated.

When she came over Saturday, after my hike to Jack's River, she had noticed that the stench in my master bath was similar to that in her apartment. Since I have no cats, she concluded that something, say a mouse, must have died somewhere, say in the crawl space under my house. That didn't make much sense to me - why would the smell be so strong that it would come up through the floor, and yet could only be smelled in that one room? I checked in and behind all of the cabinets and drawers for a dead mouse anyway, but found nothing.

The stench hung in the air all through Hurricane Ivan. I was starting to despair - would it ever go away? Could I ever have company over without the embarrassment of them smelling the stench? Or was it a mold problem? Was the house I had just bought a lemon? An ammonia-scented, dead mouse-like, moldy old lemon?

Well, today, I found and disposed of the source. It was right there under my nose the whole time, or more accurately, right there under my feet. I should have realized it sooner after L.'s dilemma. It wasn't her cats, of course, but the wet carpet after the flood that had caused the smell in her apartment. I had placed a small throw rug outside of the shower to step on as one walked out. Although I had owned the throw rug for several years without problems, I hadn't kept it immediately outside of the shower, but in a drier location near the bathroom sink. Apparently, sometime over the long Labor Day weekend, when both L. and I had taken several showers, it went mildewey from some combination of constant moistness and dirty feet. I got down on my knees and after one sniff, I knew I had found the culprit. I immediately took it out to the trash and vigorously cleaned the floor with Lysol.

The stench is now gone. All is once again right with the world, and I can now have company over without embarrassment.

Little victories matter a lot sometimes.