Cleaning out my closet

Today's guest poster usually blogs about life, motherhood, and her evil pets at I am doing the best I can. She is the mastermind behind True Wife Confessions and the painfully hilarious and 150% non-work-safe Desperately Seeking Something. She also knows how to rock a sexy, sexy pair of shoes.


I'm pretty sure there is something dead in my closet.

If only this was a metaphor, but sadly it is not.

I noticed it at the beginning of the summer. It isn't my "main" closet, filled with my primary wardrobe pieces and all shoes and silk scarves. No, it is the "secondary" closet which holds Purses, Coats (All Seasons), Winter Scarves and Hats, Books, Odds and Ends, my scrapbooking horde, last years Christmas cards which are addressed ( but never quite sent), my sewing machine, and MORE books. Loads and Loads of books.

This being said, I only open the closet to change purses during the summer. A once a week door open, location of purse desired for the week, and the door closes.

My Yankee Candle Air freshener seemed to lost it's Umph. No longer did the lovely smell of French Lavender waft out towards me during my frantic opening and shutting of the closet door.

The smell was kind of musty...like my brother's old shoes. But darker. An edge of rot hung at the afterburn of the smell. Having grown up with cats, I know this smell. I am guessing a mouse or other small rodent has left its mortal coil in my closet. And its now decomposing. But the smell is small and contained only in my closet. No one else opens this closet, so only my nose has detected the undercurrent of something being awry.

Now, I should probably clarify that I am a sniffer. It drives my husband crazy, and has become something of a joke in my family. I smell EVERYTHING. Food, people, cars, clothes, drinks...EVERYTHING. I can locate the source of a smell within seconds if I put my mind to it. I put it up as survival skill borne of a mother who fed us questionable food. Or it is a Jungian response to being poisoned in a former life. All I know is you bite into a moldy peanut butter and jelly once and you will smell everything for the rest of your life.

So my reluctance to locate the source of the smell is a bit puzzling. Or is it?

Location of the smell will lead to cleaning of the mess that is the source of the smell. My summer has been so chaotic that the effort I will have to put into cleaning is not particularly worth the elimination of the smell. As bizarre and twisted as this sounds, I am also finding this same instinct is what is keeping me from truly tackling the fridge, where similar things are decomposing, albeit at a slower more refrigerated rate.

Yes, it will be good when I don't smell that when I open the closet. Just as it will be good when I can open the fridge and not worry about the state of whatever might be in those bowls back there.

But right now, it is a question of contained chaos. And like Pandora's Box, I know it will have to be opened eventually, I am just putting it off a little longer.