As most of you know, I talk about our house as if it is a burden with infrequent but overwhelming delights. Recently, BrilliantEditor found a skyhook in the basement. Shocking, I know. No one ever finds them. Not even for sale at full price.
But there it was. We've used it to lift up a fully-grown tree and plant it somewhere else. We've hung from it ourselves and swung around, feeling more free than we ever have before. I also managed to get a view of my front yard from thirty feet up. A ladder could never do that. It wouldn't be stable. But a skyhook, a hook that hangs on a cloud or a breeze, now that's a useful article.
Why was he in the basement searching around for things? Because I detect the phantom smell of damp cabbage. It's actually the smell of mold which lives on cabbage. (It really does, I swear. It's natural and normal and it smells like cabbage. Gross.) The mold must be growing in our basement. When we had the great flood down the stairs, some of the water leaked under the garage door. Since it's been so humid and rainy it just hasn't had the opportunity to dry out. Let's add in the difficulty of having a little stream flowing through the basement, and it looks to me like the basement's not going to dry out any time soon.
So. Now I have all kind of phantom smells in my nose. These are not phantom vanilla fragrance or Coco Chanel perfume or some kind of enticing boy-smell. Nope. I've got stinky cabbage, wet dog, smelly garbage smells that I detect all over the place now. In the grocery store, at work, in my car, on my clothes. Even clothes that are certainly clean. But then again, the washing machine and dryer are in the basement…
So what's the big plan? Ask the rain to stop for a while. Please, rain, stop for a little while.
Posted by dotty at August 11, 2003 09:41 PM