Jackie Wells-Fauth
It was a typical evening, nothing special to warn me of what was about to happen. Nonetheless, the quiet, typical night turned harrowing when my husband uttered three special little words.“What’s that smell?” he asked, sniffing the air.
“How should I know?” I replied, my defenses up. “I don’t smell anything.”
I used to think this was just a phenomenon in my household, but it seems there are a lot of married people and mere roommates who tend to make up two distinct groups: those whose noses are so sensitive that every shift in odor catches their attention and the other group, whose noses are dead to all
smells… and they are better off that way. I am in the second group; my husband is in the first. It makes for some interesting marital moments.
I may be insensitive to smells, but I am hypersensitive to worrying about whether I smell. So, when my husband says, “What’s that smell?”, my first instinct is always to sniff the various parts of my own body
that commercials tell me smell offensive, (but with their product, would smell like roses). The longer he sniffs, the more paranoid I become.
“What does it smell like?” I ask.
“I can’t really say; it’s just a not-very-pleasant odor,” is his very unhelpful answer. I immediately take a shower and change everything, even my hairpins.An hour later, as I’m still basking in that fresh shower feeling, he begins sniffing the air again.
“Still an odor?” I ask, not troubling to mask my irritation.
He gives a long-suffering nod and walks around the room, inhaling deeply. “I think it’s
coming from the kitchen. Maybe it’s something in all of those dirty dishes in
the sink.”
Now, I recognized this ploy. He doesn’t like dirty dishes in the sink, but neither does he like to do them. If he could make me feel self-conscious enough about a smell, he could get me to do the dishes. Well,
that wasn’t going to work.
Until he actually went into the kitchen and ran his face at a safe distance, across the dishes, sniffing and nodding his head gravely and regretfully. Okay, so at 10:30 at night, I am loading and running the
dishwasher for half a load, scouring out the sinks and pouring vinegar down the
drain.
“That’s all I can do, if you still smell something–which I never did, by the way–then I can’t help you.” I tried to sound very stern and forceful, using the same voice I had used all those years ago to make our
children back down and quit arguing. That voice never worked on our daughters, and it didn’t work on him, either.
“It might not be in the kitchen, because I still smell something,” he insisted. I took out the garbage and cleaned the container.
“Maybe it’s in the bedroom,” he speculated. I washed all the laundry in the hamper.
“Could it be the bathroom,” he wondered aloud—loud enough to be heard.
“I just cleaned the bathroom today, so unless you used the corner instead of the toilet, no it’s not the bathroom.”
We never did track down that phantom smell, because he quit making suggestions, mostly because he could now smell the smoke coming out of his impatient wife’s ears. Peace reigned once more…except for his occasional sniffing of the air around him.
Thanks to this, one of our most long-standing marital activities, the house is very clean and so am I for that matter. However, I am not fooled. I know that sometime in the not-too-distant future, I am going to
be relaxing on a peaceful summer’s evening and he’s going to utter those three little words again…and I don’t mean, “I Love You!” May your home smell like roses and your nose always be too stuffed up to smell it or anything else!
dropsinthewell 