Death and Cherries

When I was young, probably eleven or twelve years old, I had a few friends sleep over just before the Fourth of July. After a few hours of popcorn and movies, we started flaring caps in my bedroom. After a while, we began to worry that my sleeping parents would smell the gunpowder. So, one of my friends left the room and came back with a can of air freshener that he found. I tried to stop him, but it was too late. Around the room, he had sprayed "Christmas Potpourri", a mixture of pine, cinnamon, and other festive scents. Of course, this didn't hide the smell of gunpowder, but formed an unholy alliance with it. "Jeez, now it smells like a forest fire in here! Nothing conspicuous about that!" Well, we didn't get caught that night, but my point is this: There are certain smells that just don't go together.

Let's look at another example. This happened a few years ago, when I worked in the IT department of a 2000 employee company.

Stacey's cubicle and my cubicle were the closest to the garage wall. The closer you were to the garage wall, the more privacy you were afforded. In fact, there were no disadvantages to working at that end of the department. Well, except for the pervasive smell of bat shit.

One spring, an egregious number of bats decided to roost in the concrete seams of the company's garage. Their habitat's location was on the second floor of the garage to be exact, a matter of feet from my cubicle. One Monday morning, as the San Antonio sun rose and its light shown through the garage and heated up the bat condominiums, the unmistakable smell of bat guano reached our cubes. That smell was unmistakable to me partially because of my lifelong love of bats and partially because a close relative once opened a tub of bat guano in our sealed car. That smell was unmistakable to Stacey because she had a lifelong fear – I guano you not – of bats eating her hair. One quick call to the maintenance department, I thought, and a janitor will enlighten us with an intelligent solution.

One quick call and one long wait later, maintenance showed up with an intelligent can of air freshener. Here we go again. Before I could stop him, he sprayed the entire area. This time it was citrus-scented. "How's that!" He grinned, like he'd just solved something. "Great," I said, "I'm orangasmic with delight." He wandered off, the sarcasm still floating in the crowded air. Soon the spray combined with the reek of guano and I found myself in a bat-infested orange grove, whose slogan would have been, "Welcome to the dark side of the Sunshine State. Enjoy your stay."

This brings us up to today, or rather, this weekend. This weekend our house began to smell bad. Really bad. We thought the problem was our "wetlands restoration project". That is to say, a water pipe broke in our yard and a section of the lawn was getting more than its fair share of water, not to mention plant rot and alligators. So we threw money at a plumber and he fixed the leak. Today, however, the smell was worse than ever. However, this time we were able to identify the unmistakable stink of a dead mammal (How I recognize that smell is another story). Upon further investigation, we were also able to identify a raccoon-sized hole in our chimney cap. I'll assume here that you don't need or want any more details. Let's just say that Mr. Gummy has been bagged and is ready for pickup.

You know there's a tie-in somewhere, don't you. Here it is. Once the chimney sweep extricated our little friend (and identified him via his dental records), the sweep popped open a tin of solid air freshener and placed it in our fireplace. By the time we could stand to come back into the house, the smells had mixed. The house now smells of Death and Cherries! Which, no matter what it sounds like, is not a dessert or a CSI episode. It's just nasty.

September, 2004