We attempted, on the weekend, to find the source of a particularly hideous smell wafting throughout our downstairs. My husband crawled under everything possible, and we unscrewed the heating vents and looked behind the CD racks and underneath the stereo. Anticipating dead rats or worse, we searched and sprayed, searched and sprayed. The conclusion seems to be something died in the walls, which downstairs are solid wood. Our house is 100 years old, and it's a race to see which falls completely apart first, us or the house. I guess we'll be forced to call a pest control company, though last time we did that, they caught nothing and I went around asking complete strangers how to get rid of rats until someone told be of a concoction of peanut butter and anise seed. I'm a Buddhist, so this killing creatures thing is deeply troubling, but I wasn't going to catch rats and release them into the wild, as if there is a wild close by. But they were eating the water tubes on the washing machine (2 X), dishwasher (3 X) and refrigerator (2 X). I was going to be forced to divorce my husband and marry a plumber if the rat activity continued.
My suspicion is that this time it's squirrels. But a gang of racoons ate a large hole in our roof a few years ago, and with our luck, it's a gang of cats or hamsters maurading the neighborhood. I just wish whatever animal it was believed in cremation, because I hate to think of my house as a cemetery.
You probably think, given my lament about hating housework, that the rats are all my fault. But not true. In this city everyone has rat tales, and they are more prevalent than pets. The creek nearby doesn't help and also that we all have some fruit trees, and also that certain nameless neighbors have pets in cages in their back yard where grain falls on the ground like manna from heaven.
So, while everybody else is obccessing about H1N1, I'm reading up on bubonic plague and looking for bite marks on my dogs. Talk about your biblical references. Maybe it's time to retire to that brand new condo with no yard and no access for tiny creatures. New cabinets, new doors, and maybe the laundry in the basement. Yeah, like that's going to happen. The closest thing to a new house we've ever had is 25 years old. And even if we got a new condo, we'd be the wrong age for it. I don't think retinol is going to de-age us fast enough to look right in a new place. So while something in the walls is de-composing, we're trying to compose ourselves for a long siege of lysol, pinesol, Nature's Miracle and other de-stenchers. Which is what will probably kill us in the end. Oh, well.
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