Wrong on so many levels, or why it’s much more fun to find rodents on the subway platform

(a long and humiliating post in 2 acts)

ACT 1

This happened a few weeks ago, but it has taken me a bit to actually be able to write about it.

Why?

Because it’s gross.

And embarrassing.

Before we get into what happened, there is some background info I need to share. While I’d like to think of myself as a tomboy, I’m very much a girlie-girl in many aspects: my love of indoor plumbing (why pee in the woods when, somewhere, there surely must be a working toilet?), my dislike of bugs such as leeches and cockroaches, and the fact that I do very much like to wear clean clothes.

I’m very particular about my laundry (neurotic?). I have all sorts of special soaps – the kind that is truly biodegradable and won’t give beluga whales a skin rash; soaps to keep colors from fading; products that will prevent colors from running, not to mention Borax, vinegar, baking soda and vodka, a trick learned long ago in the college. Anyway, my clothes are very well laundered, thank you.

So it was very very strange what happened next:

I washed my clothes, plus sheets, bath towels, and a big pile of beach towels the night before leaving on a trip. There was nothing unusual about the process. I wheeled the granny cart with dirty clothes two blocks to the Laundromat, washed and dried everything and wheeled the granny cart full of clean clothes back. I then threw my clean clothes in a suitcase and left for the weekend.

Scott, the cat and the semi empty bag of laundry stayed home.

When I returned, there was a funky smell in the bedroom. It smelled like wet clothing that didn’t dry properly. I figured Scott had a sweaty t-shirt in his hamper and asked him to investigate.

The next day the smell persisted. It now smelled like wet clothing that didn’t dry properly plus a lingering fart. Again, I figured Scott was to blame. I asked him to do his laundry already or at least remove the offending garment from his hamper and quarantine it somewhere.

Some light sniffing took place and the source of the smell remained unidentified.

The day after that, the smell began to turn into a stench. Now it smelled like wet clothing that didn’t dry properly, plus a lingering fart, plus something rotting. Once again, I figured Scott was responsible. Perhaps he forgot to take his gym socks out of his gym bag. Maybe he traded his t-shirt for that of a homeless man. Who knows – but I was certain it was his fault. After all, he is the male in this relationship and we all know that boys are generally responsible for a great array of odors.

Some more serious sniffing was organized, and yet again, the source of the stench remained unaccounted for.

This was getting serious.

So we sniffed again. And again.

It had been a busy week, and I hadn’t yet put the remainder of the clean laundry away, since it was just towels and bed linens. They were neatly folded on the bottom of my huge laundry bag – or as neatly as one can fold fitted sheets, but that’s another story.

Just for kicks and giggles I thought I’d give the bag a sniff, cuz you know, it would be funny to point out to Scott that the freshly laundered laundry was the only thing keeping us from asphyxiating in our now stinky bedroom.

So I did. And I nearly gagged.

What?

No smell of expensive Earth friendly laundry detergent. It smelled like a sewer in there.

What? My? Clean? Linens?

Noooooo……

OK. I figured perhaps one of the towels didn’t dry properly and the heat and humidity of the past few days, along with the closed up laundry bag caused a bit of a funk build-up.

No problem. I had the laundry tools to fix this. I started by spritzing some Fabreeze onto the bag’s contents, removing each item one by one and transferring them to a different bag.

I figured, that way, the Fabreeze plus one wash with really hot water should take care of it.

First I pulled out the neatly folded pillowcases, then the sheets. How can something folded pretty smell so bad?

Then came the towels. This is when I noticed some weird lint-y stuff on my favorite beach towel.

I looked closely and the lint sort of moved, like it was self propelled or alive or something.

Weird.

Then something in the bottom of the now empty laundry bag caught my eye. I wasn’t ready for what I saw:

A DEAD MOUSE ON THE BOTTOM OF MY CLEAN LAUNDRY BAG.

I nearly fainted.

Rodent.

Dead.

Rotting.

In my clean clothes.

What the fuck?

I dropped the pile of towels on the floor. Maggots, jostled from the comfort of the beach towel, kinda got loose.

Dead rodent in the bag. Maggots on the floor. Can it possibly get any better?

(to be continued)