I know I've seemed unusually quiet lately...During the last round of chemo recovery, we spent over two weeks at the cabin. Every time we return from being away from the Minneapolis house, I’m particularly tuned in to whether I smell cat pee. When I’m in the house day after day, I worry that I’ve just gotten used to the pee smell, so the real test is after being gone a while.
This time, there was a smell, but it wasn’t cat pee. More like corpse. We didn’t notice anything dead on the floor, and the dog didn’t find and present us with a rotting rodent. It was a mystery until I opened the refrigerator, which apparently stopped cooling and started heating shortly after we left the house two weeks before. The timing is just a guess, based on the stench and the mold.
Bob disappeared and returned with both nostrils fully packed with toilet paper. My stink solution was to put peppermint oil on a bandana over my nose, but the oil was too strong and made my eyes water. We agreed on the plan before opening the fridge door; I would hold the bag, Bob would dump stuff in. There would be no emptying, rinsing and recycling containers. Our refrigerator was a Superfund site. We had to move quickly.
Our fridge isn’t off-limits to my hoarding. I watched condiments I’d had since college, now black with mold, disappear into one of about a dozen plastic trash bags. We couldn’t put much into each bag because they got heavy fast. There were a lot of mysteries; Bob was particularly distressed about the egg shells. Empty half egg shells, sitting in the back of the shelves, evidence that something terrible had happened in that fridge long before the compressor went out. We didn’t have time to stop and agree to not live like garbage people in the future, but we made a pact with our eyes. I did ask Bob to please stop announcing each item as he removed it from the freezer. “Fish.” “Waffles.” “Meat.” It was all liquefied and drippy.
Service Plus repair had an opening in four days. We secured a temporary mini-fridge the next day: Craig’s List, 1987 Montgomery Ward, $10. A person has to drive out to Eden Prairie for that kind of deal, and by the time we got home, there was bloody dog diarrhea on the living room rug. It continued for about 36 hours. Bob documented the dog’s stomach distress in vivid photos. Weirdly, our vet didn’t want to see all the pictures, but if you’re interested, Bob can walk you through the progression. We think that amidst the gagging and screaming while we were hauling bags of rotten food outside, the dog decided to taste the Salmonella puddle sitting in the bottom of the freezer. I was going to say that I’d take bloody dog diarrhea over rotted refrigerator any day, but Bob cleaned up the diarrhea, so I don’t really know.
I had retrieved the Bissell Spot Bot carpet cleaning machine from the basement and was filling the reservoir with new cleaning fluid. I didn’t notice that someone who wasn’t me put the machine away last time without emptying out the dirty water chamber. Not expecting it to be full, I accidentally dumped it on my feet.
We only use that machine to clean up animal vomit, pee or poop. Whatever got sucked up last time sat and steeped in the machine for several weeks, and when it hit my bare feet, I had a screaming attack followed by exhaustion, and when Bob said I should have been paying closer attention to not spilling it on myself, I was somehow unable to help any more with the diarrhea cleanup project.