Every year when this day comes around, I'm reminded of one groundhog who lived in our midst and who came to quite the surprising end.
We were living at the big old yellow farmhouse in Lincoln when one late summer day a certain smell filled the air of the house. Now this was not a good smell. Having grown up in old New England houses I immediately recognized the smell as dead animal; most probably a dead animal in the walls of the house.
It was rank!
The odor grew stronger and stronger in the rising temperature of warm summer days. As the days went by that rank smell did not go away. If anything, it seemed to continue to increase in its potency. This was not a small squirrel or bat that had died in our walls and whose odor quickly faded away as its small body disintegrated.
We had to find this thing...find out what it was and dispose of it...soon! The smell was no longer just lightly wafting through the house, it had taken over! It became hard to eat anything in the house - harder still to cook anything, as the smell overpowered whatever we were trying to cook. More onions!
Ace and I searched and searched. The house had 11 rooms as well as a basement, a woodshed, an attic over the main house, and even a funky attic over the woodshed.
We finally determined that the smell seemed strongest in the area of the old summer kitchen. This was a room with a beautiful old fireplace and hearth in it. The hearth was so large you could walk into it if you crouched over a little. In the 1800's it was where they did most of the cooking, especially in the summer, when they could open up and let the cooler outdoor air into the room while the cooking fire burned all day.
Our search included the precise technique of walking around the room sniffing the air and determining where the smell was the strongest. I even took my odor detection method to going up to individual walls and sniffing them. I also decided to stick my nose up the big chimney and seeing if I could find the source of the terrible odor up there! Who knows, maybe some large animal had fallen into that chimney and gotten itself stuck...and died there, leaving us to find it and clear it out!
But, no...all to no avail!
One day I could just not take it any longer, so I decided to air out the summer kitchen and opened up the outside door that led to the woodshed and the funky outer attic. In short time I realized that indeed the smell had not cleared out any more, if anything, it had gotten stronger!
I now took my sniffing technique to this new area and actually found a loose floor board that we'd never even noticed before. Somewhat gingerly, I kicked the board to the side and found myself looking down into a big, deep hole with a large whiff of that said-same smell wafting up at me...real strong! I quickly called for Ace to bring a flashlight, and within a minute we were standing, staring down into an old 25-foot stone-lined well that had some water at the bottom. And, much to our surprise, dismay, and delight...all combined together!... there was a large, actually exra-large because it was so bloated...woodchuck/groundhog floating in the well water!
Number one - who knew that this 25-foot deep well was even there under a loose floor board for us to blindly stumble upon?!
Number two - so that's why when we moved into the house the only thing left by the previous renters was a picture of a cute little woodchuck on the refrigerator door! I remember thinking - "Yeah! I'm back out in the country where the wild things live!" And, the first spring/summer when I planted my first garden there, I watched it get decimated by these "cute little wild things" , one plant after the next!
Grrrr.....
And, now - Number three - how were we going to get this smelly, bloated carcass out of the 25-foot deep well?!
this makes me think of two things....other dead animals under the house and other gardening efforts!
Do you remember the skunk that ended its life under the blue room? and I will never forget the SMALL brush fire that was part of the garden preparations early one spring.
ahh...the lincoln house!
Posted by: jen | February 05, 2007 at 11:43 AM