I was out of town a little while over the last few weeks. I left my husband and son at home, alone. It’s always scary to come home to just the two of them in the house. They are cut from the same cloth so no telling what you will find, where.
One of the first things Jimmy told me was that there was something dead under the house. Our house was built on a crawl space. But our house is over 100 years old so no telling what’s under there. And we physically quit being small enough to get under there a long time ago. Living in the country you come to expect spiders, and mice and crickets in the house. We have never had a snake in the house, knock on wood. We had a rat one time but he was nice enough to die under my daughter’s bed so we truly had to fumigate the entire house after we found him. We thought he was under the house too. We also have a slew-hoo of cats who sometimes get under the house because it’s warmer, or cooler under there. We try hard to keep everything out but you never know.
But I was informed that there was something dead in the house. Jimmy said that he was sure that it was behind the dishwasher or under the house right there. He checked but didn’t see anything and he couldn’t pull the dishwasher out but it wasn’t anything under the cabinets because he checked all those places. I asked if maybe it was something that had rotted somewhere. Absolutely not. He knew that the house was messy but there was not anything rotting like a potato or an onion or anything else like that.
Jimmy’s idea of cleaning includes a whole lot of air fresheners. You know the ones, I think they are made by Glade. They probably were in fashion back in the 1960’s when they first came out. But they smell like something sweet, and they are overbearing. You can open them just a little bit or all the way. They last for about a month. Jimmy loves these things. I hate them. So, he will buy them, and then hide them. I will find them behind things, like something on the book shelf, or the chair in the family room, the toilet, the piano. And a lot of times he just opens them up wide and drops them back behind the entertainment center, or the trash can. Anywhere he thinks where I won’t find them. And when I find one I am bound and determined to find them all. My goal is to find them all and throw them away. His goal is to keep me from finding them until they’re empty. I’ll bet there must be 10 or 15 on top of my cabinets in the kitchen. He knows I’m not going to go up there looking for anything.
When I first started dating Jimmy he lived by himself. He had bought a mobile home from his brother that was across the yard from the family home. I don’t know why he decided to move out. He was always at his mother’s house. He ate there. She did his laundry. They watched TV together. But he had his place and it looked like a man lived there. There were dirty clothes everywhere. There weren’t really dirty dishes, except glasses. It was pretty messy. But he really didn’t have people come over there. Most of the time his friends still visited him at his mother’s house. It was like he only slept there. He never used the front door. Everyone came in the back.
When you walked in the back door there was a very noticeable smell of moth balls. I had never been around moth balls, except at my grandmother’s house. She had a cedar closet and there were moth balls in there. But I got used to the smell and never asked anything about it. One day I was there by myself, before we were married. I was on the phone and sitting at the kitchen table. All of a sudden I saw a mouse dart across the kitchen floor. I want to say that was my first ever experience with a mouse. It scared me to death. I stood up on the kitchen chair and refused to move.
I got off the phone and called Jimmy who was in the milk barn, milking cows. He sent his nephew over to rescue me. Ben was about 12 or 13 then. I told him he needed to catch that thing and get it out of the house. He caught it all right. But then he played with it for awhile before he got rid of it. Later, when Jimmy got over there, I asked him if mice were an issue. He told me that sometimes there was but he really didn’t like it when they died in the house or under the house. He mentioned that was why he had the moth balls. You really couldn’t smell anything dead with the moth balls around. I never knew.
Back to present day. I informed my boys that if the house wasn’t such a mess that we wouldn’t have that smell. They told me they checked everywhere and it had to be something dead. My mother always told me that if I had the house clean I would never get bugs. She was right. When I didn’t keep the house caught up well I would invariably get bugs and I would have to work myself to death to get rid of them, much less keep them gone. I have used that same philosophy when it comes to mice and other critters.
So I decided to clean. I’m not saying I did a full proof job because it didn’t take me long to find a bowl of eggs from out in the barn. It wasn’t full but I do remember those eggs coming in. We haven’t had fresh eggs for awhile but we still had one hen laying and Jimmy found these and brought them in. They hadn’t been on the counter too long but I could tell right away that they were the source of the smell. One of them was broken. That bowl reeked of a combination of death and rot. Nasty.
I took the bowl to Jimmy and asked him if this was the smell. Yep, that was it. We dumped those eggs and sanitized that bowl.
I had to go all around the house to find all of those moth balls. The next time I go out of town I’m taking them.