Dearest Rachel –
Kris has been working here for nearly an hour and a half, and has yet to make it out of the kitchen. However, it looks like she’s about to wrap things up, and begin on the (relatively) lighter work of cleaning up the rest of the house, now that she’s finally discovered the source of the scent – and while it may not be the last thing I might have expected (it was rotting food, after all), it was nowhere near the top of the list of possible causes in my book.
You see, for the last week or so, there has been the smell of what we thought was rotting meat coming from the kitchen. It hasn’t been overpowering, but more than noticeable when we would enter the house from outside, where the smell couldn’t seem to reach (or at least dissipated to the point of nonexistence if it ever managed to waft its way outdoors). Once inside, however, it would eventually blend into the ambient atmosphere in fairly short order, in much the same way that one acclimatizes oneself to pet odor in a house after a matter of minutes or hours.
Still, whenever any of us (or at least, Logan and myself, as Daniel doesn’t seem to bother with the place) would venture into the kitchen, it would intensify to the point where we were determined to ameliorate the situation if we could. The problem was, we weren’t sure what the source was, and – since it would depend on the answer to that first issue – how to deal with it.
You’ll probably recall how, back in the day, especially when we would have Ellen (or later, the girls in general) over for dinner, we would rinse off the dishes and set them in the dishwasher for a full cleaning and sanitation. The food detritus we would rinse down the drain and forget about after dinner (since we no longer saw it) would occasionally get stuck there and begin to rot, leading to a foul smell until it occurred to us that’s what was happening. At that point, we would turn on the tap, run the garbage disposal for a few moments, and sent everything down. Sometimes, if we had any, you would even retrieve a few eggshells from the regular garbage as a chaser, and to sharpen the disposal’s knives on in the bargain. I don’t know where you heard that worked that way, but I wasn’t in any position to argue whether it did or not, and it did get rid of the problem.
But upon trying that the other day, there was no discernable difference in the atmosphere in the kitchen after running the disposal as before. So, whatever the source of the smell was, it wasn’t anything that had been sent down the drain. And to be honest, that probably could have been guessed at, as we don’t do all that much cooking, and virtually no entertaining in the house these days, so there shouldn’t have been much down there in the first place. But eliminating one possible source, while slightly useful, didn’t solve the problem.
Yesterday afternoon, I decided to try a different tack. Both Logan and I have been using the oven fairly regularly – him with various store bought dinners and the occasional ‘from scratch’ macaroni and cheese, me with the odd sandwich or other leftovers – so perhaps it was the meat or cheese drippings that were causing the smell. So when Daniel and I got home from Sunday dinner, I fired up the cleaning function on the upper oven (we rarely ever bother with the lower one), and let it do its thing.
Pretty soon, we were dealing with a completely different sort of overpowering smell, along with a stinging sensation in the eyes – well, at least, I was; Daniel didn’t make any comments to such effect, for his part. It wasn’t until Logan got home that the new situation was resolved, as he was the one to whom it occurred to turn on the vent above the oven, and clear out the smoke the cleaning process was generating. You probably would have gotten a good laugh out of the two of us dealing with the smoke in the meantime, as we were as clueless about what was happening as we were about the original smell that we had been trying to deal with by starting this process in the first place. And in a way, the rotten smell had disappeared, replaced by the scent of smoke in the air; it wasn’t a pleasant one, like that of barbecue, but it was slightly better than that of rot.
Unfortunately, while it covered the scent right up until Kris arrived to clean the house today, it didn’t actually get rid of the problem. This was because the problem wasn’t anything in the oven, any more than it had been down the drain. It was a couple of packets of corn tortillas, when Ellen had brought over for some dinner months ago (since, of course, she can’t eat flour tortillas, because gluten) and left here. And since none of us boys like corn tortillas, they simply sat there, going stale, and eventually… rotting.
We’ve had bread go moldy on us before – you probably can still remember losing a half-loaf now and again in the piles of stuff we used to have – but it never smelled like this. When Kris opened the one bag that had still been sealed, something nearly fell out that looked like dryer lint after a heavy load of dark clothing. I probably should have taken a picture of it for you, but I didn’t really want to be downwind of it any longer than I absolutely had to. I still cannot believe that corn would smell like rotting meat, but that’s the closest thing I can think of to describe the smell – and I’m kind of sorry to have to describe it at all, since I’m telling you all these things in order to remember stuff as well as to keep you informed, and that was a scent I would be just as happy to forget about.
Needless to say, we bagged those up in a hurry and brought them outside to the garbage bin. Thank heavens, too, that pickup is tomorrow; we’ll have these rolled out to the curb without fail tonight, I can tell you. Meanwhile, Kris has doused the room in lemon-scented cleaning solutions, to the point where the only thing we’re likely to want to make in there for now will be mixing a bottle of lemonade with a package of mint leaves from the local specialty foods store to have a concoction like that stuff we enjoyed back in Jericho. Hopefully this dissipates quickly, too, as it’s overpowering in its own right, but I’ll be the first to admit it’s a darn sight better than the stink of rot.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I’ll catch you up when something else happens around here, but for now, keep an eye on us, and wish us luck. We’re going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 