Smells

Our house is a brick ranch, built in 1955. I'm pretty sure there has been a cat peeing in the basement every day since the thing went up. We moved in about 18 months ago, and I've been fighting the old person/cat piss smell ever since.

I've tried everything short of fire to alter the smell of the house. I draw the line at scented candles and incense because I have a healthy fear of unattended flames developing a mind of their own and proving the existence of sentient candles by burning down my house. So I'm restricted to those goofy plug-ins which are arguably more dangerous than candles and smell pretty bad anyway. I'm threatening to rip up the carpet in the family room and replace it with laminate flooring, but until our giant mutt goes to the great dog farm in the sky, we're stuck with the stank.

A few days ago, I cooked up an amazing dinner with green, yellow and orange peppers, chicken, cheese and a whole lot of pats-on-the-back. The good part about this combination is the versatility - add green chilies, and you've got a Mexican feast. Take out the cheese, add the soy sauce, and you've got a stir fry. Forget the whole thing and order a pizza, and you've got my dream dinner. But my cooking abilities are increasing, and I didn't burn any of the ingredients during this attempt to feed my family something everyone would eat.

This successful dinner yielded a hidden bonus - it made my house smell great for about a day. It took me a minute to figure it out, but the smell of peppers, chicken and cheese reminds me of our pre-child camping trips to Canyonlands, in Utah. We used to make hoagies on a Coleman stove, drinking beer out of cans labeled "BEER" (love state-run liquor stores). We would play gin rummy, and feel smugly grateful that we had chosen a college in such close proximity to the desert.

I was reminded of the time we constructed a shelter with tarps, using rope and every ounce of Husby's carpentry skills. We dragged a picnic table under the roof in time to escape the torrential rainstorm, and were terribly proud of ourselves. We could see a pair of campers across the sand that didn't fare as well in the storm. They were huddled over two mugs of coffee, drenched and miserable.

I scampered over in the pitch dark to invite them to come and hang out with us under our shelter. They were not expecting me, and I was lucky they were hippies, and not hunters. (Sneaking up on hunters is not a good idea.) I scared the crap out of them, but they were greatly cheered by the prospect of getting out of the rain.

They came over and sat with us under our tarp tent for a few hours, telling us about their adventures in camping across the country. They had their mugs, they explained, and ate most meals out of the mugs. If you make oatmeal in a mug, they told us, everything that you eat from that mug will taste faintly of oatmeal. They seemed good natured enough, despite the fact that rain really was following them around the country like Linus's dirt cloud. This was good news to us, because we thought it was our presence that brought rain to the desert...

For a moment, my kitchen waved out of focus and was replaced with the memory of flaming red rocks against a brilliant blue sky. All it took was a whiff of the peppers/chicken/cheese combination to break out of the brick ranch in the Midwest and go to the desert for a few moments.