Sunday, January 18, 2009

Broadus III, Smelly Tupperware

The house we rented in Broadus had no basement, but it did have a crawl space, if you could call it that. There was no way to get into this crawl space, and once you found the space, there was no space to crawl.

One night, Audrey and I both woke up to some weird sounds. We heard real loud and high pitched, "eeeee - eeeee - eeeee" that last for out a minute. Then we hear real loud "meeeeeoooooowwww." You know the sound of a cat fight. This repeated itself a couple of times. We knew that a cat and some kind of animal were having a fight, but it sounded like it was coming from inside our house. It was kind of unsettling.

Soon, we were to know exactly what had happened. A powerful skunk smell invaded the entire house. Audrey and I began coughing and and nearly choking on the smell. We quickly got up to check on our daughter, Rana, who was sleeping in another bedroom. She was less than a year old. And, even though it was winter, and cold out, we opened all the windows in the house to air it out. But for a while the odor got stronger and stronger. There was only one thing to do. Since Rana was sleeping so well, which was unusual for her, we put on our winter coats and went for a long, cold, in the middle of the night walk. When we got back, Rana was still sleeping, and the smell had only slightly diminished.

The next morning I inspected around the foundation and found where a family of skunks had burrowed under the foundation to live in the crawl space. I wondered how many were under there. Unfortunately, a stray cat thought it would be a nice place to get warm, too.

There's more to this story, which I will tell you later. But over time (several weeks) the house did air out. But my wife's Tupperware was ruined. We washed it over and over. We scrubbed it. We tried to air it out. But it had absorbed the skunk smell, and that smell would not go away. I don't remember how many years we kept that Tupperware hoping the smell would go away. But every time we checked, the smell was still there.

Well, this is enough for one day. I'll write some more on this tomorrow. And just so you know, this is a true story and nothing in in has been embellished. 

Enjoy your coffee, and have a good night.

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