It is kind of a problem
Earlier this week, my husband and I were driving home from the city after my class. Our respective commutes went a little crazy once I went back to school, and I had to go and complicate things this summer by deciding to drive in to my classes from the suburbs after trying and failing to make the Metra work for me most of the last school year.
Driving in is cheaper, even paying for parking a half block off Michigan Avenue. I usually don’t have to worry about being late anymore, and that’s accounting for Chicago’s hateful traffic. Before, I barely made it to class on time due to the commuter train’s lackadaisical approach to getting to the station when it was supposed to. Gone are the hours spent in rage as the train halted between stops for no discernible reason. Even better, I never again have to experience that sinking feeling once the conductor announces that the train will be stopped indefinitely because SOMEONE WAS HIT. (It was awful and the train didn’t move for three hours.) Plus, now I get to control when I leave instead of praying I’ll get to the 10.30 train - were I to miss it, I wouldn’t get home till almost 1a. I am getting old. That is not acceptable, even for me.
But we only have one car - by choice - so my (darling) husband shifted around his work hours and starts late on the days I have class and we drive home together.
Backstory, much?
This is just to explain why late the other night we were a couple of suburbs away from home when a skunk darted across the highway. Can I just say that I see way more roadkill here, by the way, than I ever did when I lived in a really small town? But I didn’t feel a thump that indicated Pepe Le Pew had shuffled off this mortal coil, at least at our hands, so I choose to believe that he was fine when we left him. (Denial gets me through the days when squirrels lie down in the road and wait for me to drive by and I don’t see why this theory shouldn’t work on skunks, too.)
However.
We drove the same path home the next night and at approximately the same spot there was… an odor. Skunky. Not strong, but enough to get my attention. I think I’m weird, because skunk odor doesn’t actively offend me, but that doesn’t mean I want to, you know, bathe in it.
This morning, when we got in the car to go to the train station for the regular morning commute, P made a face. “I think the car smells like skunk,” he said.
“No,” I told him. “There was probably one outside.” It was the garage, I thought. Or my front yard. Skunk convention at the park. Some rich dude having a bad day at his house. Not my car.
Except when I went to get in the car this afternoon after work, which happens to be pretty far from my front yard… I smelled it.
That skunk is avenging itself from the dead and it waited twenty-three hours till we drove by again to do it.
PS: I am a new regular poster on my friend Andrew’s pop culture blog Slowtimer. Here is my first post over there.
(originally posted at elizawrites.com)