Warning: Not for the faint of heart...
Last week walking through the kitchen after dinner I caught just a whiff of something--enough for me to file a mental note to take out the garbage as soon as I was done with what I was doing.
A half hour later, as I was walking through the kitchen again the whiff had turned into an aroma, slight, but still there. I opened up the garbage pail, but no, the liner was new. Under the liner? Who knows what could have leaked in there. But no, the pail was clean and the smell was not coming from there.
I looked around. On the counter top were the usual things: cutting board, knife, package of crackers, loaf of bread, fruit basket. Nothing to cause any kind of odor. I looked inside the microwave. Nope. Under the microwave. Nope. Since I was still in the middle of something, I decided to get it finished and come back to really investigate.
Fifteen minutes later the smell had grown into a miasma that filled the kitchen. I could almost see wavy lines and a yellowish haze hanging in the air. I checked the microwave again. Under the microwave. Behind the microwave. The sink. The oven. The refrigerator.
All this time the odor was growing and I was beginning to get frantic. Maybe a squirrel had managed to sneak in the back door and die. Nope. Possum? Goat? Rhinoceros? Maybe an escapee from the zoo crawled into one of the cabinets when no one was looking. Elephant, for heaven's sake???
All this opening and closing of various drawers and doors attracted the attention of my husband who was watching a movie in the dining room. He glanced over with mild interest, and I said, rather desperately, "Can't you SMELL that? What IS it?"
"Oh," he said, "I bet it's the Limburger cheese."
Limburger cheese? By then the smell was beginning to roil around me. I looked down at the counter in front of me. There it was. A knife with a slight residue from the cheese.
"I can't have this in here! It smells terrible! It's awful! Like a dead animal!" But as I was saying this, I could see him nodding happily, agreeing with me but in a friendly, distracted way as he tried to turn back to his movie.
"You HAVE to get that out of here--I can't stand this smell!"
"Okay," he said over his shoulder.
What I thought: problem solved.What I should have thought: he gave in waaaaaaay too easily.
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Fast forward a couple of days.
I was calling my sister on my cell phone just at twilight. I have to do this from the back deck because although my phone has fantastic reception just about everywhere else it won't work in my house. I was pacing back and forth as I was talking and I caught another whiff of you-know-what.
Wow, I thought, I am so glad we got rid of that cheese. The smell is actually strong enough to get through a plastic bag and out of the closed garbage can. (We keep the garbage cans next to the deck during the winter.)
And then I turned around and saw it. A block of Limburger cheese on a cutting board sitting on the railing of the deck.
Limburger alfresco!
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My husband tells me that he began ordering it for his father on-line because no one carries it locally. (Can't imagine why that would be.) He tells me that he really likes it now, too. He tells me that since he keeps it in an air-tight container in the fridge and only opens it out on the deck he has solved the (my) problem.
Okay.
Check out this
link. I am definitely siding with the doctor from Louisville on this one.
