Skunk in the Morning

A smell you remember. (I wrote this about 13 years ago and decided to leave it as written.)

I kept smelling my armpits. I pulled the short sleeves of my pink and white pinstriped sweater up to my wrinkled nose and wondered, bewildered, "Is it me?" The others didn't seem to notice the stink. I put on deoderant twice, realizing as crumbling pieces of the chunky white stick fell into the air, it was doing nothing.

Stan jumped up from his side of the bed. I stirred awake, "Is that a skunk?" I whispered across the large bedroom, trying not to wake Luke. "Yeah," he managed, choking on the stench. I had been sick with a virus for days but my curiosity lifted me effortlessly from the warm sheets and up into the pungent morning to explore the saturating odor that dared even to invade my dreams. Automatically I surveyed the yard from each second story window. I envisoned a giant lumbering skunk plodding across the freshly mowed lawn, his rankness radiating from his body in waves of color.

Seth's body was stretched out over his comforter. Was it the smell that had motivated his sleeping self to find its way to our bed earlier this morning? And then, finding no relief, back again to its own? My nose poked again into our room. Definitely worse in there. The crib was still, I noticed, and my energy was enkindled further. In a moment I was stepping over the sleeping dog on the stairs, an obstacle lying in the path to the coffee pot. She pulled her great body to a wobbly stretch and followed me to the kitchen. "How are we going to exist today in the stench?" I asked Josie. Her giant nose ferreted in under my elbow and a bit of grounds flung across the counter, missing the filter.

I left the pot to its magic and turned to the dog wagging with question and enthusiasm behind me. What IS it? She asked me with her ears. "What are we doing? What am I smelling? She felt the enchantment of the morning too. I grabbed her giant head in my hands "Do you want to go out?" Her long body spun around in my tiny kitchen and she pointed her nose at the back door. Endless body - head, neck baaaacck, taail - slithered out the screen door and impulsively began to sniff the yard and air in a frenzied search for the source. I winced a bit, imagining a Great Dane doused in skunk fetor, and closed the door.

Coffee's brewing, find your book. A mother alone. I scanned the possibilities around me. It only took a moment and I was captured by the golden current of sun reaching across my front porch. It drew me to the front door. A heavy stream of morning sun cut through the cold shade embracing our house. It flowed through the rails on my right and pushed toward me through the wooden slats of the porch swing. Before me, a vertical wall of glistening molecules dripped to the floor and stretched at a falling angle to the opposite corner where it rested fervently upon the adirondack chair.

I returned with some urgency to the kitchen, filled my tall white cup with hot coffee and added a dollop of cold milk. The cup, balanced out in front of me with care, led me quickly back to the door and the light beyond it, allowing only a pause for my free hand to thrust into the pile of books and magazines on the coffee table as we passed.

The morning air was chilly, it fell damp on my arms as my bottom, legs and back at once were toasted by the warm chair. I sunk into it, squinting up for a moment to judge the time I had before the sun drew its rays back behind the Patterson's house. The blazing hole radiated directly before me and my eyes could only dance and blink around it. Its intensity echoed orange spheres in my vision as my eyes bounced away against the dark green siding, the rhododendrons, the floor.

Josie came up the front steps, neglecting for a moment her morning's mission. She stood panting at me in the sundrops. "Why are we up so early?" She wondered at me. I took a sip of coffee and pointed to the inviting patch of sun on the floor beneath her. "Lay down in the sun, Jos," I suggested. Ordinarily she seeks these spots but this morning she turned and bounded down the steps, sniffing again.

I put my cup on the armrest and lifted my book. The sun was too bright and I lifted it higher, blocking the rays. I read just a few words, trying with temporary blindness to find the place I had left off, then surrendered, dropping the book into my warm lap. I leaned back, closed my eyes and relinquished my body to the sun.

The heat hummed into my skin. In my trance my arm moved the book to the table beside me. The sun penetrated me completely and I decidedly absorbed the only moments of energizing serenity I'd have all day. Mr. McCausland's car backed out of his driveway and accelerated past me. I imagined my glasses mirroring two glowing circles at him from where I sat, a wild molten creature trying to camouflage itself behind a tangle of rhododendron.

And then in an instant the beams were eclipsed by the northeast corner of the house next door and my ephemeral twinkling in the sun was gone. The sharp morning air stole upon me and the stench buoyed up from the rhododendrons.