Pretty, but putrid
The bad smell started the day we took the Christmas decorations down. I’d been at it for a couple of hours – tissue-wrapping the Mary and Joseph and cradling the glass tree bulbs back in their cardboard honeycombs – when I smelled it.
“Did we get a cat and nobody told me?” I asked, because that’s what it smelled like in the dining room. Failing that, the three dogs were next, but a good search all around the floor ruled that out.
I have one of the more keen senses of smell. My nose talent isn’t about discernment; I’m not one of those super smellers who can tell the difference between, say, a yellow crayon and a green one. But I can pick up things both subtle and far away. And the smell in the dining room was getting to me.
And so, I followed my nose to the sunny ledge by the windows. Aha! There, in a clay pot among a dozen clay pots, was the stinky culprit.
My paperwhites were blooming.
Sometime before Christmas I’d planted a few bulbs and forgotten them. It was easy to do. That room has become such a greenhouse. Every horizontal surface has something growing: herbs and flowers and leafy houseplants – all the work of green-thumb genius Patrick. I see bare space and say, “Books!” and he sees bare space and says, “I shall dig in the dirt!”
Yes, it was the flowers, the leggy white blooms that are a kind of narcissus. And honestly, what do they have to be so narcissistic about? They reek.
I Googled this, and it’s not just me. Paperwhites contain a chemical that about 25 percent of people find bad smelling. I suppose the rest of you think it smells nice.
This variation in how we perceive smells is not uncommon. Some people think cumin smells like sweat, and I’m one of them. Lots of women wear the perfume called Youth Dew, but I don’t like to be near them because to me the perfume smells like wet dog. And while we’re on the subject, cilantro tastes like soap.
But back to the paperwhites. As I stood over them, holding my breath, I remembered how the flowers ended up in my dining room in the first place. A couple weeks before Christmas, my daughter, Grace, and I babysat a friend’s toddler. That morning, I’d bought a bag of flower bulbs and a little ceramic pot, which we helped the little girl to decorate. I kept a few of the bulbs for myself, and planted the remaining one in the painted pot and wrapped it up in a bow. So, in other words, the mom left that day with a paperwhite bulb, and that stinkbomb should be blooming in her house right about now. We are sorry.
With the weather so cold, I couldn’t exactly move my paperwhites outside. I thought of putting them in my daughter’s room, but it turns out she’s with me in the 25 percent. With every passing hour, the dining room was growing more stinky, until fumes were oozing out into the kitchen. They just had to go.
I moved the flowers to a far corner of the basement. What a shame. They really are pretty.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.