The Sweet Smell of Spring

Months passed.  Spring was in the air!  It was April, and the early thaw brought high hopes!  The sun came out and my spirits went up.  In just a few days time, patches of grass could be seen where snow and ice used to be.  The roads became a filthy mess, but who cared?  It was SPRING!!  My cagey self was ecstatic! Of course, upon stepping outside, I would discover that it was still friggin' cold...but the sun was out!  Just about anything could be forgiven if the sun was out, right?

A few days after this brief reprieve from the gray and cold, a smell started filling my house.  I search high and low for where it was coming from.  Because it seemed to descend on us overnight, I thought for sure that it was coming from the plumbing in our house.  All day I looked for that smell.  It seemed wrong that it should be so beautiful outside, and yet my home all of a sudden smelled like a porta-potty. I remember bundling up that afternoon to head out to the BX in search for a stronger cleaner.  That must be the problem.  Maybe I just don't see the source of the stench.  I remember grumbling to myself about scrubbed toilets as I stepped out the door.  That is when it hit me!

The SMELL!!  Stepping out that door, I walked right into a wall of funk that made me want to scrub up!  All of a sudden, I realized that the nastiness that I was smelling wasn't coming from my home at all.  It was EVERYWHERE!!!  It honestly smelled like a very neglected outhouse at a campground.  Stepping back into the house, I slammed the door behind me.  Staring at the door, I remember saying, "I literally live in a s*&t hole!"

When my engineer got home, all he could talk about was the stench.  It wasn't until the next day that he found out the source.  Our location's sewer system was a lagoon.  During the Spring thaw, the edges of the lagoon had defrosted, and the sheet of "stuff" had flipped to the top.  To make matters worse, a few days later....it would re-freeze that way!  The unfortunate part of the situation was that the lagoon was on OUR side of the installation.  I soon found out that the majority of enlisted housing was blessed with not being down wind of this monstrosity. Did they just decide that officers could use part of their income as a Yankee Candle allowance???  If that was the case, they should have just given us an allotment for it!

I would soon discover that the smell was going to be an annual occurrence for us.  With the sun and promises of spring came the greenish, stomach turning funk that floated through my home. I noticed that the BX kept an ample supply of Yankee Candles on prominent display at the front of the store.  Wives would "host" candle parties out the yin yang.  Either you embraced the "light" or your home smelled of feces. The spring of our last year, I actually heard this conversation between two children: "Gross!  What's that smell??"  The more seasoned kid who had been there a while responded, "Spring, what else?"

Now, every spring, no matter where I live, I think about those springs in the Great White North.  As I breath deeply of the fresh, rain kissed air, I think about the fact that there is a spouse who is desperately trying to figure out where that horrid smell is coming from in her home.  She will scrub her house from top to bottom, thinking that she must have missed something.  In frustration, she will go down to the basement, thinking that the smell is a burst pipe.  On the verge of having kittens, she will open that door and be hit by it...the "Sweet" smell of Spring.  For the first time in her whole entire life, she will buy that Yankee Candle and light her up!