Yep, Mr. Shakespeare. "Love is a Smoke Made with the Fume of Sighs." I Will (no pun there) Return This Home to Normal Scents. It Only Makes Sense

I can exhale knowing that the dead rats on the 2nd floor have pretty much evaporated scent-wise. Now, the ones that met their doom in the floorboards of the dining room are letting their stench go. They are evaporating their carcasses. I keep hoping it will soon be gone, but when I come home from work, it's the first thing I smell. I have deodorizers everywhere and immediately burn candles and incense sticks (thank you, Patrick Kelly). 

This all throws me back to college dorm rooms in the early 90s, and the intentional hippy smell that radiated from many a space. I haven't burned them since those days, but kept the stash given to me by Patrick for a rainy day. Or smelly one. Like a house full of dead rodents. Seems highly appropriate. 

My goal this morning was to wake up at 6, write until 10, get a haircut, head to campus for 5 hours of meetings, then teaching until 7:15. Waking up at 6 gives me space to get ahead of it all, as every one knows that nothing gets accomplished in meetings. And it worked...I even finished an upcoming episode of The Write Time to be recorded this week. 

Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind.

Or burnt incense sticks. Poof. Up in smoke, but a much better smell than decaying mouse meat. 

And I can't help make the connection with Tiffany Jackson's White Smoke. I drove around campus for an extra 15 minutes yesterday to finish the book. As usual, Jackson writes like no other. I wanted to bottle up the smells in my house to ask her, "Is this the scent you were describing in your ghost story?"

I'm sure it was.

Perhaps mice are to me, as bed bugs were to Marigold.