One question bothering me lately is: "What is God going to do with skunks when Christ returns?" I can't imagine sharing divine real estate with little beggars who can't even stand their own scent. Maybe God will "un-curse" skunks for eternity and give them Japanese Cherry Blossom to blast around instead of the wretched stuff they offer now.
I know I am particularly sensitive to this issue because of our basement. It reeks. Unfortunately, bad things don't always stay in our basement and the scent leaked upwards to permeate the rest of our house. If it was a stench that lasted a few days and slowly got better, I think I might have wrinkled my nose and dealt with it. But the stink ebbed and flowed like the tide, getting strong at bedtime and increasing to become horrible in the early hours of the morning. We were awakened with it at 3:30 am and opened the window to air out our bedroom. The great outdoors smelled refreshingly clean.
It sounded like a good theory to me in predawn drowsiness, but when I called my dad later that day to ask his opinion, he only said, "If it walks like a duck and looks like a duck, it probably is a duck." That is a nice idea if this were ducks we are dealing with.
But I bought into his logic and took the children's to a friend's house for the morning to escape the smell. We walked into her house only to be horrified when she said, "I can smell the skunk on you guys."
That was where my tolerance ended. If it were just a rank outdoors to deal with, I would suffer in silence (well...possibly in relative silence). And if it were only a stinky house, I might have been able to bite my tongue. But stinky humans? I called the landlord as soon as I got home.
I think it was when I saw him walk down our basement stairs with a pellet gun that I felt a surge of gladness I'm not the man of the house. For the next hour he and his son snooped around in our crawl space and shone their flashlights into dark corners to try to find the skunk. They found none. Not even under the back porch where they lifted a few floorboards to look underneath.
My brother was coming for the weekend, and I felt my privilege of hosting him was hanging on a slender thread about to be broken by a skunk dying in my house. I decided to appeal to his sense of adventure with the following texts:
Me: You won't want to miss out. The landlord has a baited trap under our back porch.
Jordan: Oh sweet! This will be an exciting night!
Me: Exactly. Especially since your window is right above the porch.
Jordan: Oh boy! Do you have a zip line to the nearest tree in case we get fumed?
It was a valid question. A midnight blast from the skunk under our back porch would instantly render our house unbearable.
Me: Well, we've been discussing our options. Either we all end up on Dawn's living room floor or the nearest Comfort Inn.
Jordan: If I hear a metallic click and the sound of a hairspray bottle losing its pressure, I'm completely abandoning ship!
Me: Lol! So are we. In fact, I told John that if this thing lets loose I am going back to IN with you for a week!
Turns out we didn't catch a skunk at all. Through airing out the house for days, the scent slowly dissipated until it is moderately stinking up our basement but not wafting through the rest of the house.
"Too bad, really." I lamented aloud. I was thinking of the trip to IN that was no longer pending. Plus, I wouldn't have minded a trophy picture in my photo album. I saw the looks they trained on me and explained, "Hey, if I smelled like a skunk for a few days, I might as well have a picture of the culprit."
Jordan raised his eyebrows in disbelief. "I'd suggest you just print a skunk picture off of Google."
Yeah, he's probably right. Must have inherited some of his dad's logic.
sounds funny!!!!!
ReplyDeleteWish I could have seen that!:0