Finding the Funk

For the last several weeks a unique scent has been ruminating inside of our fridge. Thankfully the Hurtado/Johnson nose is equipped with an exceptional sniffer, not as great as this one guy I knew in high school who could stuff 5 quarters up each nostril. Imagine how much air he could sniff into his cavernous nasal passages. For me, any smell with an unidentified source drives me nuts and drives Wil nuts because every bit of down time that we have, I spend talking about the smell and how much I wish that I could find and remove the funk.

This week the fridge smell reached an intensity that made us all crazy. Animals wandering into our yard became aggravated and disoriented every time our fridge was opened. We avoided chilled food and lived off raw meat, random food scraps and late season berries. So last night, Laura suited up in a garbage bag with a clothes pin on her nose and started looking for the smell. A few moments later, the source was found. Several rotten cucumbers lay pickled in green mold covered juices on the bottom of a drawer hiding underneath some egg plant. There is no greater feeling than finding the funk and removing a nasty smell. I thanked Wil and ran a victory lap around our house holding the white garbage bag in the air and then chucked it proudly into the garbage, it was liberating and pathetic at the same time.

On the flip side, my father in law, John Alan, lost his sense of smell after he crashed into a tree during a ski trip. As a result his sniffer does not work. I have wondered if John were to hit another tree or run into a wall face first if his sense of smell would come back, it's worth a try. Anyway, because of my heightened sense of smell there is nothing that annoys John more than me trying to find the funk. For example, my in laws used to have a house dog named, Sophie. Sophie was a nervous curly haired poodle sort of dog that crapped and peed in their living room for several years. This was a challenging time in their household one that involved many veterinary examinations and eventually led to medicating the dog so it could relax and stop having frenzied evacuations on the living room carpet. Unfortunately, the medication dumbed down the dog making the problem worse. Later on it was discovered that all Sophie needed was a doggie door. Her nervous tension was actually caused by having no access to the outside world when needed. I think that I would have responded the same way.

So during the "Sophie Years" I did what any good son in law would do and when we were in town I used all my energy to describe to John in the finest detail possible the pungeant odiforous smell of the carpet. You will be glad to know that I successfully drove him to the edge of sanity pointing out the wall of scent that Sophie created in the house. And even more maddening was the reality that the scent was only a doggie door away from ever existing. Poor Sophie, poor John. Oh the humanity!

Can you smell it?