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It was early evening and I was standing in my bedroom talking to a friend on the phone while watching my dog run around in the back yard. At the very moment when I detected an all-too-familiar and yet very unwelcomed odor, my kids came bolting in the room in a panic.
“There’s a skunk in the house!” They both shrieked in unison.
“What?” I asked, completely horrified, but knew the odor that was now starting to fill the room was proof they might be correct.
“There’s a skunk in the house!” They repeated, again in unison.
“Did you see it?” I asked (ok, maybe it was more of a scream). My mind was racing at the thought of a skunk actually being in my house. If that was the case, I realized I would simply have to surrender my home to the skunk. After all, how would one recover from a skunk spraying inside the home? The easiest thing to do would be to simply give up, leave all belongings and go. I would just grab the kids, the dog, the cat and move across town. My husband would have to figure out how to deal with the house. Isn’t that the job of a husband? Wasn’t he in charge of changing the oil in the car, fixing the roof and selling a skunked house?
In my 15 years of living in this house I have endured countless mice scurrying around in my kitchen, one snake lounging in my utensil drawer, a squirrel raising her babies in my attic, at least a dozen wasp nests on my porch, one wasp nest in my chimney and a black widow spider hanging from a light fixture in the dining room. Surely I have housed enough wildlife. I shouldn’t have to adopt Pepe le Pew as well… but I digress. Back to my panicky children…
My children responded that they hadn’t actually seen the skunk but it must be inside because the whole house smells bad. That’s when my thoughts shifted from indoors to outdoors. I ran to the door and saw my dog rolling around in the yard. Yup, it was official… Griffin had been skunked. I ran outdoors to assess the damage.
Learn from my mistakes. When your dog has been skunked, don’t pick him up and carry him into the house. What ends up happening is that you wind up smelling as bad as the dog. In my defense though, I do believe severe skunk smell invading one’s nostrils must affect brain function. I wasn’t thinking clearly.
Three baths (one done at the veterinary clinic), six bottles of Febreze, 4 cans of Lysol and 6 odor removing candles later, the skunk odor is more of a trace than an all-out olfactory assault. I will say though that there was one silver lining through all this – I didn’t have to stand in line very long at the store to purchase my de-skunking products. People were more than happy to let me go on ahead.
Now, remind me again what purpose skunks serve in nature? Surely they have an important function, although I’m still trying to figure out why God made mosquitoes.
