Summer is so fun.

In July of 2007, my family had a very unusual occurrence at our house. I'd just arrived home from a quick trip to Dallas and when I walked in, the house looked about the same……my own brand of housekeeping I like to call messy. I’m not a great housekeeper and that’s’ something that you really can’t hide...cause I mean it’s right there out in the open.

But anyway, after I got home my family and I exchanged stories about our weekend and who did what to whom….and then someone, not sure who, casually announced that we had a mouse in the attic. Well to me this was not casual information. This news was HUGE because rodents and I don’t co-exist peaceably or any other way for that fact, so when I heard this information announced in a calm manner, I was shocked. There was no SWAT team; no yellow police tape cordoning off the house, no 911 calls had been made. There weren’t 100 rat traps set out in land mine fashion everywhere. There wasn’t even one! But it was obvious that we had a breach of security at the highest level….but John had no plan. The few times an announcement of this magnitude has ever been made in my house, we immediately go to DEF CON 5. It’s not silly. It makes good sense and John was completely at fault for not immediately going into military mode. He knows we either extricate the rat or we sell the house for as little as one dollar by the end of the very next day. John had obviously not paid the little snitch who had told the big news enough bribe money to keep quiet. Although I did contemplate an all night watch, amazingly no one else in my family was on board to help. So that night, I slept with both eyes open.

The next day, after we got home from church, I started working to find the menace. I could feel dread in the air….coming from John. He was worried about one thing only and that was his weekly fishing trip and how the rodent event would affect that. He tried to keep his head down and make no eye contact for as long as he could. I on the other hand could have cared less about anything but making my house safe again for all mankind. After some effort on my part and dancing with appliances and searching for the broom…which oddly enough I had trouble finding, I'd found one thing and one thing only, enormous amounts of dust. Someone had fallen down on the job of cleaning...think think think.....who could that be? But this is a rat story……no need to throw stones. Anyway, now I had two goals, complete eradication of dirt AND rodents. And kudos to John because he set a record for avoiding eye contact but eventually he geed when he should have hawed and finally our eyes met and he knew it was over; he was actually going to have to help. And so after several hours of intense cleaning, my utility room shined like a 20 year old penny, I was satisfied. Every breach, up to a paper clip sized hole, within the confines of our house was closed for good. I was convinced all rats were uninvited.

But I knew of one little problem outside and so my focus then turned to the exterior of our house. For two years there had been one small hole in the eve of our roof. No less than fourteen million times John and I had discussed this hole and the fact that it should be closed up. This hole was teeny, but it represented a danger zone, a breach if you will. I considered it to be a blinking Motel 6 sign for evil. Finally, that afternoon, John closed it completely, making it impossible for anything to get in our attic. I felt much safer. I had made a plan and followed it through. But because I was so focused on keeping things out, I never thought about something that might need to get out. That was a very big oversight.

A day went by, and nothing. There were no scampering noises in the attic, and I was satisfied.

A week went by and then one day……something started to stink.

It was a bleak Monday when my daughter, Olivia, who I found out during this experience, can sniff out a stink at 30 yards said our kitchen/refrigerator maybe stunk. I became dejected because it was obvious there was more cleaning in my future. But so as not to do something as extreme as actually clean my entire house, I began looking for specific things to focus on such as spilled milk in a towel. That’s logical. Have you ever cleaned up spilled milk with a towel and not washed it immediately? It can rock your world. It’s like Saturday night dead skunk has come to dwell in your house. And even though no one admitted to cleaning up spilled milk...even just now I can’t imagine why I would have thought they would...I decided that washing all the clothes was the next best plan of attack. So I washed them all and held my breath, mostly because it was really, really starting to stink in the house. The smell was beginning to pass stink and had arrived somewhere in the neighborhood of, “Good Lord who killed a rhinoceros in the house and did not remove it?” I’m saying it wasn't just noticeable, I’m saying stink had its own room at my house. Stink was coming to dinner. We used clothespins on our noses and I was becoming HIGHLY annoyed.

On super-sized stink day Tuesday I was beginning to lose hope. We couldn’t even sell the house now. Flies were gathering outside and telling their friends. I'd wasted hours and hours of cleaning and we were still living in downtown vomitville. By this time I had cleaned more than I had in years; BUT the house was spiraling into a stink so big it was confusing our golden retriever, Rosie. She knew there was something great and stinky to roll in, but she just couldn’t find it. It was a very confusing time for her. But even after all the mopping and scrubbing and all that had been done, hope was just about lost. How could we go on like this?

But on the other hand, oddly enough if you stayed home long enough, it was harder to smell the evil. Maybe if we just never left the house again we could possibly tolerate living with the odor. It would seem that our nasal hairs had been burned off.

Then one evening John and I went out to dinner and were gone for several hours. If only we could have moved that night. We were tired. We had cleaned and cleaned. When we got back to stinky Pete’s house we were ready to take it easy. But when we walked in the door, the odor slapped us around immediately. It was bold and in your face and taking no prisoners. Stink was now in complete control of our home and had no intention of relinquishing its grip.

A short time after we got home, my niece, Carlie, came over and the instant she walked in the door, her face screwed all up and she looked as if she might just turn around and walk right back out but before she did she said, “Yeah so what stinks?” My head fell in terrible disappointment. I was beaten. I was disgusted, frustrated, aggravated, and exhausted…..all the bad words. The stink had won. What were we to do? More cleaning? It was my own personal hell.

And then in a split second, it hit us like a thunder clap….we remembered….we had closed up the hole outside. Ahhhh….we had closed up the hole. Something had gotten trapped in our hot attic in Louisiana in July. Whatever had come in the hole had never gotten back out. It was dead and rotting and highly stinking and permeating the ceiling. And I thought that was one big mother of a rat.

Now I was mad at the dead animal and John. Somehow this had to be his fault. My anger was logical. AND he didn’t run right up to the attic in the dark with a miner’s hat trying to find the thing. It made no sense. Well that night John sat at the kitchen table doing some work and for the whole two hours as he sat, I fumed and practiced my best dirty looks. It took longer than I had expected for the dirty looks to take their toll and I had to throw in some heavy sighs as well. And then finally I threw this comment out for his consumption, “We are sitting here with rotting dead animals in our house as if that’s OK.” His response was laughter……and he’s still alive. Not long after that statement he announced that the next day, when he got home from work; he would do something. I was satisfied for the moment.

Well somehow the kids and I made it through the next day and when John got home he quickly changed clothes and was headed up to the attic. Just opening the attic stairs caused the smell to come right down and smack us in the face. It was indescribable. Do you have any idea what a dead opossum smells like on the side of the road? Imagine what one smells like enclosed in an attic in Louisiana in the summer. Almost right at the top of the stairs was a dead baby opossum. He had met his death in our attic and although I felt really terrible about causing his demise, I was so relieved to know the stink was being eradicated. So John took care of the carcass…..plastic bag funeral….and we went on with our lives for a very short period of time.

Bliss barely lasted 24 hours until I walked in the house the next day and my daughter Olivia looked at me and said without any fear for her safety, “It still stinks in here.” I was ready to give up. Would we have to burn the house down? How long could this go on? Could we just leave everything and start over in another state?

When John got home later that afternoon from working in the paper mill in 110 degree plus heat, he was super excited about the new stink that had shown up. So with joy in his heart, back up to the attic he went following Olivia’s nose and direction to the exact spot where dead baby opossum number 2 was found right above the den. Unbelievable….you can’t make this stuff up. And so we both prayed the nightmare was over and we waited. But this time watched for Olivia’s nose to twitch; and it wasn’t very long until it did. It was becoming apparent that Olivia had some God given nose capable of hunting a stink down like a freaking bloodhound and so if she screwed up her nose we held ours waiting for a verdict. She was like the E.F. Hutton of stink…..if she said it we were going to listen.

Later that same day, I was watching TV when she walked in the den with that look on her face and said without any care at all, “It stinks in your bedroom.” My response was immediate and loud, “Don’t even say it Olivia!” She calmly responded, “I’m just saying.” And so once again John went back in the attic and followed her nose to the exact spot where baby opossum number 3 was found. The final count was in. The entire family of opossums had been decimated by our closing up the outside hole. If there was a court for opossum offenses, we would have been convicted in 5 minutes. And God bless the little creatures because when they died they paid us back and they did it well. Their stink is unsurpassed. I’m sorry for our causing their deaths and I really felt so bad about it but I’m so grateful that Olivia has a nose like a bird dog……

just another summer in the life……