For months, whenever we walked through the pantry hallway, we have been getting a whiff of something smelling like a decomposing animal. The smell was persistent. I assumed it must be a dead mouse trapped somewhere. The smell became more intense whenever we opened the doors at the bottom of the pantry, which held stacks upon stacks of jars, bottles, and boxes of foodstuffs. but I could not see anything obvious that could be causing it.
I had figured that eventually the smell would go away when the mouse corpse dried out, but the awful smell continued to linger. Finally in frustration and determined to find and eliminate the source of the smell, I took everything out of the bottom of the pantry and wiped the interior clean. I couldn’t find anything causing the smell, so I put everything back into the cabinet.
Months past and the smell continued. Confused, I pretty much gave up the search as hopeless.
Yesterday I was going to fix myself a sandwich for lunch, but couldn’t find anything to put on it in the fridge, when I remembered seeing a can of sardines in the pantry. I got it out and when I was about to tear through the cellophane covering when I noticed that awful smell. I examined the can of sardines, the cellophane wrapper seemed a bit discolored and not very pristine, and as I handled it, the smell intensified. The sardines can must have been flawed, and as it deteriorated and decomposed, produced the horrific smell we couldn’t find the source of.
Now that I have dumped the sardine can in the trash can in the shop, we can walk past the pantry without shaking our heads wondering about that awful, mysterious, smell.
Sounds like bear bait. :)
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