My office smells like something died in it. I had been out of town for a few days and when I walked in the house I almost choked on the stench. Naturally I immediately accused my seventeen year old daughter, who was lying on the couch when I arrived home, comfortably snuggled under the faux fur blanket, of not caring for the dogs properly, and that there must by a pile of poop or vomit lurking somewhere, that she left them outside too long and they found a deer haunch or something and had been sick all over the house! She defended herself calmly, saying she had already checked for accidents and couldn’t find anything, but when she saw the apoplectic look on my face, she gathered up her laptop, as well as the real fur cat, and retired in a dignified fashion to her room, closing the door firmly. I checked the laundry room, knowing it was likely there were wet rags molding in the washing machine, but the smell wasn’t coming from there. So I texted my contractor to ask him if he thought I had rodents in the walls and if so, who should I call? He texted me back and said that when he had the same smell in his house he opened up part of his wall, but he couldn’t find anything. Then he sent another text that read, “The smell will eventually go away.” My fingers stabbed a question through my phone, “Because the bodies are decomposing?!” He texted a reply, “Yes, I’m sorry to say.” So there’s that.
And then there is a blizzard coming tonight. We are expecting one to two feet of snow over the next few days. I can still hear ringing in my ears from shoveling the walkway yesterday from the mini-storm last week. Actually I was pounding the corner of the snow shovel like a pickaxe more than really shoveling, to break up the ice rink the back patio had become while I was away. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell my family that snow needs to be shoveled BEFORE it gets walked on or partially melts in the afternoon sun, they don’t seem to notice that water freezes overnight and then the dogs can barely make it out to the grass to do their business without tearing an ACL sliding on the ice. But at least they have four
legs to skate with. My other daughter almost broke her tailbone trying to get from the driveway to the back door recently. She’s in college and isn’t around enough to warrant a garage door opener, and nobody bothers to use the front door, even if that walkway is shoveled by the snowplow guys.
Trying to find a parking spot at the grocery store today, with people stocking up like we would be snowed in for weeks, was like trying to get a front seat at a Soul Cycle class in Greenwich. Or so my daughters have told me. I’ve never done a class there, nor am I that keen to sweat buckets on a bike in the dark, listening to music so loud you are supposed to forget you can’t breathe, with all your muscles screaming in Charlie horse agony. The girls trill, “It’s like, the best!” No thanks. But then again I’m almost fifty. I prefer walking my dogs and going to yoga. We got our groceries eventually yesterday, going through the express line with a full cart – invited by the cashier – but creating some pissed off people behind us. Luckily we live in a Connecticut suburb and not New York City, otherwise the barrage of epithets I could feel silently burning into our backs would have added to the ringing in my ears.
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