Souls In The House

There are no soles in the trees today.

Night before last there was a mighty racket in the back of the house.. or was it in the house? There was a clatter and a bang… we have a cast iron bathtub. It sounded like someone tossed a few rocks at it – it echoed in that hollow way. Ed and Secret Agent Dog sprung to action, checking the doors, surveying the house and were preparing to check the perimeter out doors when a cloud of skunk oil came pouring through the house like nuclear bomb. You could feel it like a wave washing over everything. I swear it moved the air, stirred up a kind of wind with it.

The really fucked up thing, as the investigation was slowed, was that this skunk smell wasn’t particularly notable anywhere outside the house. (Secret Agent Dog, having been skunked a number of times, just getting a preliminary whiff of it, before I smelled it or had any idea, came running from the kitchen, jumped into my lap, curled into a ball and hid her nose beneath her own body.) We suspect, after careful and cautious investigation, that the smell came from under the house.. from under the bathroom – likely from under the bathtub.

Remember that the only room we really haven’t addressed in the new place is the bathroom. Here we can’t use the bathtub or shower because the numbnuts who build the place didn’t use waterproof materials around the tub. We’ve ripped up the linoleum but haven’t laid anything new – so there’s simply exposed subflooring with its cadre of cracks and the what-not, pretty much letting things like spiders and well, the SMELL OF SKUNK, come right on up through from under the house.

I’ve suspected that something suspicious is happening under the house. Since April I’ve been complaining that there are a few areas around the perimeter of the house that are open, where we’ve taken the siding off for access while doing this or that project. They need to be closed back up so that rodents can’t get under the house. I think it’s too late. Last week Secret Agent Dog took to barking at the bathtub in the middle of the night. I think rats are living under the tub. Night before last I think the rats were displaced by a rogue skunk. I’ve got a guy coming at 3 pm today… I’m not gonna tell him about the skunk.. but I’m gonna send him under there and have him close it up. I haven’t yet thought through how we’re going to go about trapping all that have made homes under there yet. I don’t think kindly on the smell of dying things wafting up through the subflooring either.

So there are no soles in the trees today. But it seems there are other reasons to be a little dissettled.. a little shaken from the regular routine. And one is the smell of skunk that permeates the big house sort of like a ghost.. lurking in every corner. There’s no escape..