As I write these words, I am sitting on the deck of a dear friend’s home in Colorado. My view is nothing short of spectacular, and a much-needed respite from what has become a roller-coaster kind of life.
“You’ve got to stop and smell the roses,” my friend Mary insisted.
Well, I don’t smell any roses but I do smell fresh, clean air heavy with the scent of pines in the breeze.
Mountains surround me … some snow-capped, some covered with aspen trees. Horses and cattle graze freely in pastures outlined by rivers and evergreens and scrub oaks. A John Denver CD is playing softly in the background.
To say it’s bucolic could be the biggest understatement I’ve made in my life. It is the exact opposite of what I left behind in Ohio because, as you read these words, strangers are going through my house buying bits and pieces of my life.
I didn’t intend to be out west when I hired Akron-based Pier & Co. to do my tag sale, but that’s the way it worked out.
And I’m kind of glad. “Ignorance is bliss” isn’t a cliche for no reason. It’s absolutely true. Just like “stop and smell the roses.”
When I walked out the door, headed for the airport, my home was in a complete state of disarray.
Dishes, clothing, jewelry, linens, shoes, you name it … it was all pulled out of cabinets, drawers and closets.
It must’ve upset my German shepherd, Chico, so much that he threw up on the carpet in the family room before I left. I only had minutes to attempt to clean it as the acrid aroma burned my nose.
“People are going to be coming through here in a couple days and they are going to smell this hideous smell and think I live like this,” I thought as I scrubbed and gagged.
This isn’t the first time a house I lived in has been graced with a stink bomb without me there to explain it or worse, to find it.
Years ago, we were trying to sell our home in Westlake. Our realtor suggested an open house and on the appointed day, we loaded the kids in the minivan and left for three hours.
When we came back to our house on that warm afternoon and walked upstairs, a wall of hideousness hit our nostrils. We followed our noses into the room of our oldest son, who was 4 at the time.
Because of the open house, his closet door had been opened, but what none of us knew was there was a small trash can in his closet filled with urine.
About two weeks before, we had told him he had to stop leaving his room at night. Apparently we failed to mention it was all right to go to the bathroom. He took us literally and, threatened with losing play privileges with his Thomas the Tank Engine set, he took to tinkling in his Sir Topham Hatt trash can that he hid in the corner of his closet.
I shudder to think how many people walked through our home that day and shuddered themselves when they were hit in the face with that smell.
A few years later, a similar scene would be repeated in another house.
Our daughter had been in the hospital for a week, and I had stayed with her 24/7. When we were finally released, we arrived to find the house in a wreck and the toilet in the boys’ bathroom hadn’t been flushed since the day I left. Clearly the hubby and our two boys had turned the house into a giant locker room.
Wanting to make a point, I refused to pick up around the house, and I just kept the door closed to the boys’ bathroom.
This went on for several days, and got so bad the dog would back down the hall just to avoid going past it.
Imagine my surprise when I came home one day to find a note on the front door from the local police department, which read:
“Our dispatcher was notified of a possible burglary by UPS man who found front door open. After a thorough search conducted by 5 officers [and the UPS man, I would later find out] nothing seemed to have been taken though house appeared to have been ransacked. Please call at your earliest convenience.”
I opened the door, which I had forgotten to body-slam before I left — necessary due to a poor amateur attempt at installing weatherstripping — to be hit with a wall of nasal-hair-burning smells from the boys’ bathroom at the top of the stairs.
I never found out who the officers were. I don’t want to know who the people are that went to that open house, and I don’t want to know who went to my tag sale. Ignorance is bliss.
I also know that sometimes you have to stop and smell the roses. Because if you ever come to my house, chances are good you will smell something else.
Contact Robin Swoboda at Robinswoboda@outlook.com.