what's that smell?

( Or, the day my life became my blog title. )

So for a few days at the beginning of this week everytime I came home I was greeted by a stench as I approached the steps to my front door. I would stop, sniff, grimace, look around, see nothing, and continue on into the house. I figured that maybe my severely overgrown flowerbed was mulching or something organic like that. Wednesday night I came home, started up the steps to the door, was hit in the face by the stench, looked down, and in the middle of the day lilies I see a lifeless paw... and I look a little closer and recognize a little black & white cat that used to run around my yard quite a bit. I put two and two together with the "missing cat" poster I had seen the day before (they really loved you, Sylvester) and ran across the street to rip off the attached number. They're not home, so I tactfully LEAVE A MESSAGE that I found their cat, and it's not alive, and it's in my flowerbed, and I leave my address and name and number. In my defense, I was headed out right away and wanted to a) let them know asap and b) get the thing out of my flowerbed. About 10 minutes later I'm in the house and I hear this woman sobbing outside my front door. So I go outside and there's a young (20-ish) woman, her boyfriend, and her mom all standing around the dead cat. She's bawling, the boyfriend is glaring at me like I killed the damn thing, and only the mom had her head on straight and thanked me for calling etc etc. Then she tries picking up the cat with 2 safeway bags. It drips. The girl is staring and crying. I suggest that she maybe not watch this part? and say "geez let me get a garbage bag for you" and run in the house. So somehow I end up holding the garbage open while the mom shoves him in there, paws catching on the side and decomposing carcass smell galore. All I can say is "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry...". He wasn't an old cat, so the mom figures he got hit by a car and must have crawled over to my garden to die. So the moral of this story is thus twofold: #1 ~ don't let your cat run around unleashed if you live on a busy street like Avenue H, and #2 ~ maybe trim your damn flowerbed. There was a rotting cat carcass in there for 5 days before I noticed. In +32 weather...