Today was a day of  chores, as it will be for quite a while.

If there is anything less than a hundred cans of cat food in my house, it is not enough (well, OK, I am kidding…almost not enough) and I decided to stock up before my time is claimed by the details of my mother’s move. Off I went to a pet food store and loaded my cart, as usual, with a good assortment of grain-free products. I loaded three huge bags into my car with the help of the store owner and went off to my next stop, the supermarket.

When I returned to the car after shopping my nose did a double take. I had to open the door and the windows, and as I sniffed around thinking that the odor source might be the rubber feet of the bathtub bench I purchased the day before for my mother but left in the car, my mania was appeased for a few minutes until the strange and pungent odor began wafting around the car again, full force.

By the time I got home I was green; anything and everything, everything I sniffed, including my clothes, the bags, the carpets smelled like something had died, if not worse. One of the huge bags of food was reeking from the odor by the time I got everything into the house.

A can of food appears to have exploded open in the bag and the contents went all over the other cans, soaking the labels. By this time my kitchen, my hands, about twenty five cans of food were saturated with an inconceivable odor. Had an animal been fed this putrid, fetid, obviously tainted mess, it would have bolted. Then again the smell alone was enough to topple a Sumo wrestler.

I dumped all the cans in that bag in the sink and found the open one, with the lid blown off and shoved it in isolation. Believe me, putting it in a bag was not enough. Now the sink was full of the odor, and it was wafting to my upper floor. After trying to wash the cans I gave up and called the store owner who, despite my description and semi-wretching articulation, still didn’t get what had happened. “Never in my twenty years in this business have I ever heard of anything like this!” Of course it would be me. He told me to come right back. It was almost 6:30 pm when I got there with my son, the two of us barely able to breathe as the stink molecules had taken over the linings of our noses. We drove with all four windows open.

I motioned for the owner to come out of the store and after he opened the bag and stuck his face in he was blown backwards; he looked at me in disbelief. “Never in twenty years…” he tried to say again but was gasping for air.

He took the stinky cans to the back of the store where they do dog grooming and gave them a perfumed bath, dried them off and sprayed them several times with doggie perfume. (There was still a slight residue of stink). Then he shlepped the bag to the car and had us run the air conditioner on exhaust while he sprayed more l’eau de puppy.

We were all in a kind of stinky shock and found ourselves in reverie: can you recall the Seinfeld episode where the stinky valet skunks the car and the odor can never be gotten out? It was bad enough that I was driving around with a wheelchair/rollator taking up the whole trunk with a shower/bath bench lying on its back, its feet straight up like it had rigor mortis in the back seat. But dead meat in a can on top of that? Even Spam couldn’t be that bad.

It was another one of those days.

It’s always something.