skunked

I woke up at 3am absolutely convinced that I was in the old attic bedroom up in Lake Mohegan.  The room with the rotting wooden floorboards painted a gorgeous dark burgundy.  The room with the unbelievably steep stairs built into a narrow underused coat closet.  The room with the window seat surrounded by bookshelves, the little reading nook where I'd spend hours just staring out through the brilliant red leaves of the Japanese maple.  The room that got so cold in the winter that I would have to migrate down to the itty bitty guest room (aka the maid's room, in the inherited parlance of that wonderful house's previous owners: summer people who lived in the big city fifty miles south) for several months out of the year or risk burning down the house with electric heaters.

I woke up with a start, convinced I was home again, and it took a moment of tossing and turning, sniffing and scrunching up my nose, to finally figure out what it was that had awoken me.

I turned to Evan, elbowed him in the gut (sometimes I am not an easy bedmate), demanded to know if he smelled it too.  That unmistakable odor of skunk, wafting six stories up in our concrete jungle and through the wide open windows in the middle of an unseasonably warm February night.