October 24, 2007--A very pungent object lesson

Erick has just about finished fixing his truck--the one that used to be his grandpa's. For the last several weeks he's been going down to his grandma's house and working on it in the garage, because we don't have a garage here (well, we do, but it's full of the owner's junk) and also because Grandpa's tools are still in his garage. He brought the truck home a few days ago and left the car there until we had time to go down and pick it up Monday morning. When I got in it, it had a really funny smell to it. I thought maybe it was a mildew smell at first, and thought maybe someone had left the windows down in the rain and that it had been closed up for a few days and that's why it smelled that way. So we rolled the windows down and drove it home. Last night I took it to drama practice, and it was smelling pretty strong. We tried to just get used to it, but it was getting difficult. Today I was going to take it grocery shopping, and I knew Erick had purchased some apple-cinnamon air freshners for the truck, so I asked him if I could put one in the car because it was really stinking. Erick went out to check on it and it was really smelling terrible by now, so he started hunting through the car trying to find out what was the problem. He finally opened the trunk and took out the false bottom, and down by the spare tire found a busted package of ground turkey that had been there since last Tuesday when we went grocery shopping last. It had somehow fallen down in there and gone unnoticed for eight days! The rotting meat had created pressure that caused the plastic to explode and spray meat all over the inside of the trunk. I had wondered why I had one less package of meat than I had purchased. I thought maybe I had just miscounted them. Last night I ended up using chicken in the minestrone because I ran out of ground turkey. It's interesting how no amount of air freshner will cover up the stench caused by rotting meat. I thought it was a very good example of how important it is to get to the root of the problem instead of treating only the symptoms.