diana cowgill

I’ve been banished to my bedroom by plumbers that have come to clear a truly heinous kitchen sink blockage. The boyfriend and I have named it The Soup, and it has been wreaking havoc on my normally nice smelling house.

I am ashamed of The Soup. It really hits you when you walk in- a vaguely earthy, dirty, rotty stench. Not sewagey, not garbagey. Something quite different and uniquely foul. I imagine it’s the way being buried alive must smell.

It’s gross, and I really am very embarrassed. It reminds me of the time that I forced the evacuation of my fourth grade classroom. I was a messy kid. Disorganized, scatterbrained, and with very little interest in cleanliness slash hygiene. I had one of these desks:

That’s the messiest looking picture of that kind of desk that I could find, and it is nowhere near as bad as my reality. My desk was overflowing with so many papers and candy wrappers and folders that the thing had to be tamped down. Tightly compressed every day. The items in the rear of the desk were pushed and compacted so densely that there was no airflow. No oxygen, no movement. A mess unremarkable, for a ragamuffin like me, except…

Among the wreckage there was an orange. One single piece of fruit that months before I hadn’t eaten. Instead choosing to keep it safe in my (then very open) desk. The orange, being organic matter, started to decompose. The desk’s pressure kept building, and the fruit kept decaying, undisturbed.

Until the fateful day that my teacher told us that we had to clean out our desks. Something smelled, she said, and we had to find it. We would empty out our desks and unearth the stench.

I unloaded the desk of all its treasure. Spilling like a clown car onto the classroom floor, I had the biggest pile. I was horrified, however, when on one of the very last shovels, I felt something soft and ominously wet. When I brought my hand out, the fingers were covered with whitish powder. Which I smelled and recoiled.

I felt terrible. The stench was my fault. I was the nastiest kid in school, with a science experiment for a desk, and if I wasn’t careful everyone would know it. I took a discarded paper and picked up the orange. I threw it away and rushed to confess. I found it, I told the teacher. It was me. It was an orange in my desk. She was not surprised, and asked if I had disposed of the thing. Yes. Quietly, she said, go back to your desk and finish emptying it. I did as I was told. Rubbing the powder onto my pants as I walked, I looked around to see if I had been seen. Nobody looked up. Nobody giggled or turned around or caught my disgraced eye. They were too caught up in making sure they weren’t the nasty ones to notice the true culprit creeping back to her desk.

We finished cleaning our desks, and our teacher said she’d found the source. It was an orange- never mind whose. We had to go outside for a little while to air out the classroom, and she hoped we’d learned an important lesson about keeping our surroundings better organized.

I didn’t learn the lesson. But I took away a pathological hatred toward festering citrus, and a crippling fear of being outed as funky.

So you can just imagine how much I hate The Soup. The plumbers are still plumbing, and I’m still banished. I hope to have a nice smelling house again very soon. But I won’t hold my breath.