The Haunting Smell

I admit it. Sometimes I do want to give up this whole righteous caring for Susan deal. Like right now, for example. I don’t like the gross urine smell that is permeating one half of my house. I have tried all week to wash it away, launder it out or to toss it to the road with the garbage. The culprit is evident, but where all this urine might be- is not.

At first I figured she just slept too long and couldn’t wake up to get to the bathroom. But my inspection of the bed sheets showed no familiar round wet spots. So I just stripped her of her clothes and washed everything. The smell persisted. I searched for the pee pot that might be lingering disguised as something nonchalant around her room. I found none. The bathroom itself (located directly next to her bedroom) reeked. Two showers later and all linens in the bathroom now washed, the smell clung.

Today while putting clean laundry into another bedroom in the same hall, the smell almost knocked me upside down. Infuriated, I quickly found Susan and strongly requested that she get in there and find out where the smell was coming from. What was I thinking? As if she would remember where she did it! Or threw it! Or hid it! Or whatever else she might have done.

She blamed it on those girls. What girls? There are no “girls;” only her to blame. I again removed her sheets from the bed. This time I asked her to place them in the laundry basket. As I picked up the clear laundry basket by the handle I saw toilet paper in the bottom next to a very wet rag. Afraid to know, I looked closer! Yuk! Yellow liquid dripping around my laundry basket with toilet paper as if it were an outhouse or something! Please tell me how that happened while sitting in plain view right in the hallway beside the bathroom door!

I am trying hard here. And yes, I do get discouraged when I see my house going to pieces, my dishes chipped up, the crystal broken and my carpet all polka dotted. It is not that these things are so important to me, but almost every last thing around here is being nicked, stained, stolen, broken, or (the dreaded) peed in.

Now, all the clean sheets and clothes later, yet why does the smell keep hitting me in the face when I walk into her room? Ah hah! Unbelievable! But ohh noo- not her gold shoes!