Stinky and Smelly

  

Having two teen aged daughters has given me a great love for my dogs.
My dogs don’t talk back to me. They don’t cringe when I talk to their doggy friends. They love everything I cook and they never complain about anything I do or anywhere I take them.
 If only my teenagers could take a hint from the dogs.
 Stinky and Smelly are my two little dogs. One is a Rat Terrier (“the” American breed) and the other is a Dachshund-Terrier mix who looks like he had some Dalmatian swimming in his gene pool at one point (maybe warthog too, considering how much he farts.) They give me great memories every day and their antics make me laugh or want to kill them every single day.
 Kind of like my teenagers.
  One day I came home to find a white trail leading from the pantry and my two adorable bits of fur were nowhere to be seen. So I followed the trail. It wound through my kitchen, down the hall and into my office. Cringing I walked into my office to find Smelly chewing on a decimated bag of flour. He was completely white. Normally he is only partially white. (Smelly is the one with the Dalmatian in his bloodline) I looked around for Stinky. All I found were white paw prints leading out of the second door of the office. So I followed the prints. They led me down the hall, into and out of the bathroom, through the family room and into Smelly’s box.
 Smelly was in the box, covered in flour, and he would not look me in the eye.
 He knew he had done wrong.
 He also knew a bath was in his future so he slunk to the back of his crate, trying to escape the inevitable.
 It took about an hour to clean up the mess and the dogs, but I was laughing the whole time. Why they would chomp on a bag of flour was beyond me, but it was funny.
 What was not funny were the times (yes, multiple times) Stinky showed up smelling like a skunk.
 For some reason my Rat Terrier loves to chase and pester skunks.
 He doesn't find the skunks at home. He finds them at my parents' house. My parents do not live in a subdivision. They own property a few miles away from me and their place has a country-esque feel to it. It is far enough out that they get critters around their house that would not live in a neighborhood- aka skunks.
 One day before Smelly joined our family, Mom and I were outside at her house working in the garden. While outside, we noticed a gosh-awful smell wafting our way.
“Gah, what is that smell?” Mom said.
“Smells like a skunk to me,” I replied.
“Quick, get in the house so we don’t get sprayed,” she ordered.
She then yelled to my dad, who was walking from his barn with Stinky trailing behind him, that a skunk was around and for him to be careful of the critter.
 Dad is bit hard of hearing and refuses to wear his “ears” (aka hearing aids) and therefore, didn't hear a bit of her warning.
 Mom and I hurried inside the house and were commenting about the smell when dad walked in. He was laughing and telling us about how Stinky had cornered some animal in the barn when my mom yelled at him...
“Get out! You smell like skunk!”
Dumbfounded, Dad turned around and headed back outside.
(That was the day we realized Dad was not only hard of hearing, but he had lost all sense of smell too.)
 Turns out the animal that Stinky had cornered was a skunk. The skunk got a direct hit on the dog and the dog brushed up against Dad, contaminating them both.
 Mom made Dad strip on the back porch. (I covered my eyes, cuz who wants to see their dad in his skivvies.) Then she told him to go get a bath.
 She then ordered me to “Bathe that animal immediately!”
This wasn't my first time to get the stench of skunk off my dog.  So I whipped up my “skunk-de-stank” recipe and went to work on Stinky.
 He smelt so bad I nearly vomited while cleaning him up.
 After bathing him 4 times with my recipe he smelled tolerable. (Or I had just gotten used to it.)
I however, smelled like skunk.
My clothes smelled like skunk.
My hair smelled like skunk.
My shoes smelled like skunk.
I wanted to kill Stinky.
 After bathing myself 4 times and borrowing some of mom’s clothes, I loaded up Stinky to go home.
 Quickly I realized it was time to pick my daughters up from school so instead of going home we went to school and got in the pick up line.
 It was a warm day so I had the windows down while I waited.
The pinched look I got from the teacher directing traffic should have clued me into the fact the smell was lingering.
 “How could you do this to me!” were the first words out of my oldest daughter’s mouth as she climbed in the suburban and immediately rolled up the window.
“I am sooooo embarrassed!!” cried the other one as she closed her window too.
Yep, I had gotten used to the smell.
“Stinky got into it with a skunk," was my reply.
“You should not have picked us up with him smelling like he does" whined the oldest.
“I washed him 4 times, bathed myself 3 times, and trashed my clothes and my shoes!” I yelled. “I had to borrow an outfit from my 72 year old mother and I am barefoot while driving! I did all this so you two wouldn't have to deal with a skunk sprayed dog!”
“You should have let Grandmother pick us up. She would never embarrass us.”
My mother? Yeah, right.
 Stinky didn't complain though. He just jumped into my lap with his tail wagging and licked my face. He appreciated me.
 Too bad my teenagers didn't.
 Because three weeks later Stinky had another direct hit from a skunk and guess who had to clean him up?
 Yep, by that point, I was used to it.

Photo copywright poecrastination 2015