The Stink Smelled Round the Block

This afternoon I was tired of watching Robbie play the Wii, so I decided to play outside with our dog Belle. As soon as I walked out to our back porch I was immediately knocked over by a rancid smell. (Just even thinking about it makes it filter through my nostrils again)

My first thought was that it had rained a bunch the night before, so it could be some sort of rotting plant life. But this smell was beyond anything I could imagine rotting. So my eyes were skimming the backyard for some sort of clue, and I noticed a big brown rock that had not been there before.

In our backyard, there is a place under these huge overgrown bushes of ours that Belle likes to sleep. She is all about having a "cave" of some sort to sleep in. Inside the house she sleeps under our computer table or under our foot stool. Outside she sleeps under the bushes or under the covered part of our porch while sticking her face out through a wall.

The big brown rock was tucked under the overgrown bushes in Belle's "cave". One step closer in that direction sent an immediate signal to the brain: the smell was coming from the big brown rock. By now a quite obvious signal was present: a swarm of flies. Upon further squinting I realized that the big brown rock was a deceased animal of sorts. After some consultation with Robbie and his friend Nate, we decided it was a groundhog.

Like any concerned parent I started to freak out about how long it had been there, because I was afraid Belle may have been exposed to some strange diseases. Fortunately it was all still in one piece, so Belle didn't mess with it in any measureable way. We don't know if she killed it and then brought it back to her "cave" or if the groundhog had just crawled there to die in the blazing heat.

Now the issue of removing the putrid carcass was at hand. I was all about calling the animal control people and having them do the removal and disposal, but Robbie and Nate decided to just shovel it into a trashbag and throw it out with the trash. The thing was so huge they had to use a snow shovel to scoop it. Robbie double tied the trash bag and put the poor thing in our garbage can.

So instead of our backyard smelling like sizzling heat-death, the whole front yard including our garage was infected with the smell. There was nooooo way we could wait until Friday morning for the trash truck to haul that thing away. The smell would have permeated into our cars and who knows what else by then. So I called the animal control people and they said they could come by to dispose of it.

You know its bad when the person who scrapes up road kill for a living says that the smell is unbearable. He graciously put the unlucky groundhog into his truck and took him away. Now our garage and trash can are open to air out the smell...which I think is going to be around for a while.

You know how smell is the quickest link to memory? I hope I never have to smell anything like that ever again!