Living With The Stink

This house we set out to restore on South Broadway in Little Rock originally boasted two bedrooms, a kitchen, and dining room. Oh yes, of course it also had a parlor. I think all houses had a parlor back then. The L-shape embraced a back porch and that created a problem for us once, a real stinking problem.

Mr. and Mrs. Fox, I suppose after the birth of their second child in 1898, must have decided they needed more room. They solved this problem by adding a hallway over what had been the back porch and building an extra bedroom adjacent to it. I’m sure that they saw no need to remove the porch and open the hallway substructure to access from the crawl space.

Fellow preservation nuts: does this sound at all familiar?

Years later, along came Jimmie and Brenda. Then along came a family of rats, rather large rats. I won’t say we resorted to poison for I’m sure that’s not politically acceptable in today’s non-forgiving climate. Why don’t I just say that our thoughts and prayers, among other remedies, resulted in the decision of the last rat standing—the largest one—to make the decision that his final resting place, ere he rose on silver wings to Rodentium, would be in the space between the old back porch and the new hallway.

Call it revenge. Call it immortal payback, Call it our just reward for wishing an evil end to a creature who didn’t fit our concept of a happy world. We simply called it “The Great Stink.”

Having been dispatched into the darkness of the house’s crawl space on numerous occasions, I finally convinced my life’s partner to accompany me. Together, we realized, to our resigned disgust, that the space wherein lay the body of Rattus rigormortus was quite inaccessible to human endeavor.

As all mentally challenged historic preservation people are accustomed, we decided that we must live with the problem. We noticed that friends avoided visiting during meals. Sales people shunned us, as did the religious pamphleteers. Our dogs preferred the backyard, even on chilly days. The city building inspector approved projects based only on our word.

There were disadvantages as well. Meals became sullen affairs, avoided if possible. This was before we discovered Fabreze, so I could only guess as to whether Rattus Odiferous clung to my attire at work along with the plaster dust. Odors create bad dreams as well as other nighttime vexations. Oh yes.

German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, in typical Teutonic eloquence said: “Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker." That, of course, translates into, if I remember my college language class: “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”

All I can say is that Friedrich Nietzsche probably never had a dead rat stuck in an inaccessible spot next to his kitchen. Hell, I’ll even bet he never tried to renovate an old house. If he did, that may account for his own death.

A lessor quote by the man maybe fits us better. He said once, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

Well, as another great philosopher, Jethro Bodine, once said when he dropped a boulder on his foot while pursuing a sculptor’s life, we “commenced to suffering.” Suffer through it we did. The rats never came back. Some, not all, of our friends did. What about us?

We learned, that the burdens, trials, and embarrassment of a rat in your life require patience, lots of disinfectant, better regard for future blowback, and the knowledge that “this too shall pass.”

If I've told you once,
I've told you a thousand times:
think before you act.