On dead and dying things

Last week there was a smell upstairs. It started out lightly. You'd be walking through the bedroom and catch a faint whiff of something fairly unpleasant. But upon sniffing in earnest to discern from whence it came, the scent would elude you. Towards the end of the week the smell was stronger. You could smell it all the time but couldn't pinpoint it. I had just spring cleaned upstairs two weeks before, so I knew everything was fairly clean, but still inspected corners, emptied wastecans, checked the guest room to look for food left behind by the neices. Nothing. Upon getting out of the shower on Sunday and being met with a particularly vibrant new strain of the stench, I decided that it must be something dead, either in the walls or in the ceiling. There is nothing you can do about something dead in the ceiling or walls. I hoped that later this week it would get very hot so whatever it was would mummify quickly and stop eminating stink. So there I am staring into the mirror brushing, flossing, contemplating the tragedy of some animal dying alone within the walls of my house. Did it suffer? Was it a long drawn out death? Did it's family miss it? Did it live a full life? So very sad. And I look up and see four FOUR! gray hairs sticking out of the top of my head. I will be 37 this year and I have probably been lucky thus far to have not had a single gray hair. But there they were. All shiny and a different texture and OLD LOOKING! And it is totally not a good time to be confronted by your own mortality and irreversible aging when you are thinking about the solitary and probably lingering death of some unknown creature in your walls. I was depressed for the rest of the day.

Later that night I was getting ready for bed. The smell was terrible but it was too cold to open the windows. I saw the cat laying on my pillow and I wondered. I got down on the floor and flipped up the bed skirt. There under my husbands side of the bed was a partially decomposed vole, splayed neatly out on his back. I wondered what his placement meant. At least I knew that it wasn't the awful ending I had imagined. I scooped him up (the cat lazily looking up to see that I discovered his prize, wondering what took so long) and put him in the garage trashcan. He was just fur and bones. The stink went with him.

On a totally unrelated note, check out my Redbud in all it's spring glory.