For Mother’s Day this past May, the Husband gifted me a subscription to a “flower of the month” club. It works pretty much as you would expect – each month I receive a box. Packed inside is a flowerpot. At first it looks just like a pot of dirt, but with time and water the bulbs that are planted underneath emerge, revealing themselves and gracing our table with pretty blooms.
The bulbs are chosen according to seasonality – Daffodils in April, for example – although I can’t easily identify them all because the packing slip does not provide any information as to what type of bulb I am receiving. It’s like a surprise – what bulb am I getting this month?!
Sometimes I’ll have as many as two or three growing at once, as some take longer to germinate and also some of them last quite a while before they die back.
Right now I have two on my plant shelf – November’s Amaryllis (this one is pretty distinctive) and October’s mystery bulbs. I anxiously awaited its flowers so I could use my plant app to tell me what it was.
It should be noted that this plant shelf is really the top of a china hutch that is situated in our main living area, not far from the couch and along a wall that you must pass by to get from the kitchen to the living room.
This is lovely for admiring my pretty little plants.
Last week, as I was walking by the couch and admiring my plants, I happened to also notice a very unpleasant smell. I couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from, but I kept smelling it when I walked by that particular corner of the couch.
It smelled, quite honestly, like poop.
And not a someone-passed-gas smell, or a stinky-sock smell. It smelled like a rotten turd. I narrowed it down to three possibilities:
- The cat decided to forgo her litter box, and leave a “present” buried somewhere in the couch cushions
- A mouse got in the house, crawled underneath (or inside the hollow frame of) the couch, and died
- Some small child left an apple core or some similar rotting food item that doesn’t just hang out unoffensively like all the goldfish and popcorn do
I tore the couch apart. And when I say, I tore it apart, I mean I took our sectional apart piece-by-piece and inspected it all. I did find a lot of the aforementioned popcorn and goldfish under the cushions, and LOTS of dog hair dust bunnies underneath the frame, but nothing that smelled even remotely offensive.
I put the couch back together, walked over to the kitchen AND STILL SMELLED IT.
My big kid A-Man – who was home sick – wandered out of his room right about then.
“A-Man,” I asked him, “Come over here. Do you smell something gross?”
He sniffed and said no. Long pause, and then he said, “But, I did just come out here because I farted and it stunk so bad I had to leave my room. So I might not be able to notice right now.”
LIFE WITH BOYS AMIRIGHT.
Maybe at this point you’ve figured out where the smell is coming from. And if you have, you’re cleverer than me, because it took me another several hours and three trips by the stinky couch corner before I finally pieced it all together.
It was the flowers.
My plant app had mentioned that the flowers of the Paperwhite Narcissus were “very fragrant” however it failed to mention what type of fragrance it was, exactly.
And now you know.
