For the last week, there’s been a smell in my house. Part of the smell disappeared when a cleaning service came through. But there was still ‘a smell’. I thought it was cat pee … you see, we acquired a new cat just 2 weeks before this smell-incident and I thought maybe new kitty was spraying or not using the litter box or … something.

Alas, we caught kitty happily using her litter box repeatedly, but couldn’t discount the smell.

The smell.

Dank.

Musty.

Old.

I couldn’t figure it out. No one could, though each of the five of us didn’t smell it the same.

One smelled it in the gym.

One smelled it in the music room.

One in the kitchen.

One in the bathroom.

Me … I always smelled it in the hallway leading TO the kitchen, nearest to our family computer.

But I couldn’t pinpoint it. Walk by, smell it. Walk farther into the kitchen … nothing. Backup … nothing.

But there isn’t anything BY the family computer. It’s open-air. Nothing but a wall and a bathroom where we’d already determined no smell existed.

Argh!

How do you find a smell? Especially when no one can locate it in the same place?

Well … here’s what you do.

You forget about it.

You pretend it doesn’t exist.

This is the same philosophy behind stopping your search for something you can’t find when you’ve been looking everywhere and can’t find it!

So I did.

For a day.

And upon needing to go get the vacuum one day, I opened the door to the closet under the stairs.

I should have wafted the air that came you of that closet. Oh. My. Goodness.

At first, I just closed the door. Then I realized something must have died in there, and I opened it again, holding my breath and looking around for what might be the problem, and hoping, beyond hope, I didn’t find a dead … anything.

It took a second for me to find the real problem.

One gray bag.

One gray bag that goes back and forth to football practice.

One gray bag that goes back and forth to football practice with my SON’S CLEATS INSIDE THEM.

Oh. My. God.

I cannot make this stuff up!!

Rather than touch those cleats myself, I yelled to my son to get them out and put them in either the garage or the front porch — or to burn them.

Wow.

The smell.

From deep within a closet.

In a bag.

In the dark.

So next time you find an oddly, horribly, disgusting smell … don’t blame the cat. Check the teen first.

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