I never realized it until I was away from home for several years, but the area near my parents’ house in rural West Tennessee is full of skunks. I rarely see them alive but their smelly corpses frequently accompany the dashed lines on the windy roads.
And although they are somewhat shy and elusive, skunks are known to venture into yards where they startle, and subsequently spray, neighborhood dogs. My brother even got sprayed by a skunk once when he was camping out. Of course he brought himself inside and the whole house smelled like a skunk.
It turns out that some people can’t smell skunks at all. My wife is one of them. After several instances of running through some skunk stank while driving down the road, she kept saying she couldn’t smell that horrible funk that was pushing me to nausea. So she did some research and found out that one in one thousand people cannot smell a skunk. Go figure. I guess that explains a lot.
Tags: cannot smell a skunk, skunk, skunk smell