Having returned home last night from a long day out, I sat on the downstairs love seat and relaxed into a phone conversation with an old friend. It was raining, and I believe there was some thunder in the distance. It was a lovely welcome cooling rain, the first break from this horrific heat wave that has swept the better part of the nation, and the ambience was pleasant. After a while a sharp acrid smell suddenly invaded my airflow, and suffice it to say, my mellow was thoroughly harshed. My first thought was electrical fire. I got off the phone and walked around the inner and outer perimeters of my new house, sniffing everything for the source of the smell and looking for smoke. I phoned my awesome electrician/ neighbor/ friend who talked me through what to check. After about a half hour I verified that all the appliances and outlets were still intact and nothing seemed to be the obvious source of the burnt smell. The smell was so terrible and strong; it made my throat feel like it was being damaged by breathing in. I turned the fan on high to get some fresh air flow in, but sometimes it seemed the smell was coming from outside. After about 45 mintes of house investigations, I realized that Hopey, my trusty hound friend, had been frantically pacing around the deck, scratching the door to come in. I figured she must be scared by the storm, so I met her at the door with a towel to dry her drenched muddy self off.
Yeah.
I didn't have to rub that towel over her for too long to realize that she was the smell.
Yeah.
It was bad. It was strong.
Except the thing was I didn't realize what it was at first. It just smelled so intensely burnt, like a toxic chemical, that my first thought was that somehow she had been covered with some kind of terrible auto fluids or something- like bad transmission fluid- or even that she had been struck by lightening and fried a little bit or been burnt under the car. She was acting crazy- pacing this-a-way and that-a-way in the house, rubbing her eyes and face on the rug and acting hurt.
A quick "dog smells like burning rubber" google search and a phone call to neighbor RM cleared up the mystery for me. Skunk sprayed in the face and eyes. Poor honey.
It surprises me that I had never smelled the freshy fresh spray of skunk before. It smells nothing like a dead skunk in the road or a skunk scratch and sniff sticker. Only one word kept coming to mind last night when I was investigating the source of the acrid invasion- Wrong. This is just wrong. Something is wrong.
I was wrong.
It was just a skunk.
4 comments:
Well.
Thank goodness.
xo
Believe it or not, I've been there with my big white fluffy dog Amigo. Someone suggested we bathe him in tomato soup, which we did, and he turned pink. . . and still smelled like skunk.
d~
Glad it was just a skunk. But i must say, there's nothing like an extreme smell from the natural world to engender a presumption such as yours that its source was that of something less than natural. I wonder what somebody from a hundred years or so ago -- somebody unfamiliar with freshly expressed skunk gland smell, would have initially thunk on that.
love,
bud
i was worried you were going to say the dog had survived a lightening strike and you were smelling singed wet dog fir.
i actually really wish i could be involved in helping you solve your pump issue. i'm so excited about it... in a right down the road with city water sort of way.
Post a Comment