Woman in the Middle

We have lots of wildlife that prowls around our area. The most problematic by far are the skunks. It isn’t because of the occasional damage they do to the yard, but if you have a dog you are bound to have a skunk problem. When our dog Honey was younger she spent a little more time outside and had some run ins with skunks.

Last night as I was trying to go to sleep, the faint smell of skunk wafted through the house through  an open window. It brought to mind Honey’s most memorable  skunking.

Honey was in the back yard because we had friends over. Thank goodness dinner was over when we heard Honey barking. We looked out through the sliding glass door to see her foaming at the mouth. Just as the thought of “What happened?” began forming in our heads, the smell hit us. Honey had been skunked, right on our patio, just outside our door.

We discovered something very quickly. At such close range, the smell of skunk changes from being something you experience just with you nose to something much more visceral. You don’t just smell the skunk odor, you feet it, you taste it, you live it! Our friends decided, surprise surprise, that it was time to go home. After they said their hurried goodbyes, I strapped on some latex gloves and readied my supplies to try to give the dog some relief. It didn’t help that she was sniffing the skunk’s neither regions  when it decided to let loose, hitting Honey full force in the snout.

I opened the sliding door about five inches wide so I could get my arm out to wipe Honey off with what ever concoction we were using. Needless to say, Honey slept outside for the next few nights. We also discovered that having a skunk spray so close to the house stank up the inside for days. It took about a week to get the skunk smell to leave the inside of our home. The smell lingered in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. One of the girls was so embarrassed when she opened her backpack at school and the smell of skunk wafted out. Thank goodness the school had been experiencing skunk problems, too, so she was able to say ”must be another skunk under the building.”

We found out later that the smell followed our friends home. Their back door opens into their laundry room. When they got home they went straight into the laundry, and they all stripped down so they cold wash their skunky clothes before dragging the smell into the rest of their house.

We aren’t sure if Honey has finally gotten wiser in her old age, or if the opportunity to sniff the back end of a skunk has just not presented itself, but she hasn’t had a run in with a skunk in quite a few years, knock on wood.