Close encounters of the stinky kind

So I'm sitting here reading drafts of papers from my Concepts of Nature class while trying to ignore the ripe aroma of whatever dead woodland creature recently expired in the furnace room. I could go in there and hunt for the stinky carcass myself, but, um, in a minute I'll come up with a really good reason why one of the resident men is really more qualified for the job. Besides, I'm busy reading rhapsodies about nature from students who have just finished reading Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, so I'm well aware that my unwillingness to empathize with the small creatures that occasionally wander into my house marks me as less than human. If being fully human requires sharing my living space with mice, call me an android.

Walt Whitman wrote "I Think I Could Turn and Live with the Animals," but I wonder whether he ever had to share a kitchen with a nest of hornets? I did, although I was not aware of it until our Hornet Eradication Program led to a mass die-off in the hive, which proceeded to disintegrate and soon smelled like a dead horse. There is no room in a small kitchen for the smell of a dead horse, so I diligently hunted down the source. I cleaned the sink, the disposal, and the cabinet under the sink, and then finally I realized that the stink was coming from under the cabinet. The resident Pest Eradicator pried up the board at the bottom of the cabinet and quickly slapped it back down again: the entire space under the cabinet was filled with a deteriorating hornet's nest.

That was another time and another place but I'll never forget the peculiar shock I experienced when some of the larvae tried to escape by creeping across the kitchen floor behind my back, a memory that still gives me nightmares. That was our only hornet problem, but we have had other close encounters: the snake coiled around the water heater, the infamous incident of the rats in the night-time, the chipmunks that gnawed the insulation, the dead mouse under the sofa. There's nothing quite like coming home after an exhausting car trip, collapsing on the sofa, and suddenly levitating upon encountering the distinctive smell of dead mouse.

And while we're on the topic of mice, let us not forget the live mouse that sprang out of my tenure file and would have sprung into my lap if I had not vacated that chair rather more suddenly than usual. I had no empathy at all for that mouse, although my bitterness toward it lessened after my tenure case was approved.

Ah, finally the Eradicator has arrived. He confirms the presence of a dead mouse dangling pitifully from a piece of insulation in the furance room. I wish I could work up some empathy for the mouse, but, on the other hand, I doubt that the mouse ever worked up any empathy for me; if he did, he would take his stink outside, where he could experience oneness with nature without disturbing my peace.