What our house will smell like this winter:
Often at work, i will wander around supervising kids, and there will be a whiff of salty body odor lingering in the air. Sometime in the fall, the pockets of foul teenager smell is replaced by general sourness caused by boys not washing right, and then later in the year when we keep the doors shut against the freezing cold, a horrifying smell of youth oriented fragrances starts to soak into the carpet. It's absolutely horrifying. I know i already used that word, but it's totally the best one. One time at the very end of a rummage sale i was looking at the things that were being given away so they could simply keep them out of the dumpster, and besides the excellent find of a functioning dehumidifier (which has been serving us well for four years) i found a moldy old bowling bag containing a very heavy bowling ball with tiny finger holes, and a pair of tacky bowling shoes which almost fit me. The inside of that bowling bag: that's what AXE smells like. Dusty. Old. Nasty.Um, where was i? Oh yeah, BO at work. Okay, so a while back, i was wandering and smelling the stank, and started looking for a kid who would be nearby consistently during the experiences of odor so i could tell the dude to go wash himself. But no dude was forthcoming. No, the common circumstance was the nearness of a bucket of crayons. The crayons smelled a little like BO. Some crayons smell like some BO. Bummer.
Next part of the story: a couple months ago, Houston was cleaning up after a time of coloring. He tripped while carrying one of his Mega Giant Boxes -o- Crayons (which get passed down serially from Karen (who shuns crayons once the virgin sharpness gets rounded down) through Houston into the general crayon bucket where Katrina uses them and Zane rips off the paper) and every single crayon flew onto the floor. One crayon cleverly shot, point down, right down the heating grate. Houston cried, and i told him i'd try to get it out. The grates are really easy to remove, so i did, to find that that heating duct is almost directly over the furnace in the basement. I could see the crayon resting on the heat exchanger which surrounds the core stove like oven thing of our old style gravity-feed octopus style furnace. My longest arm woudn't reach the crayon.
So now, every time the heat comes on, we get a smell of hot crayon permeating our house. Hot, plasticky crayon. Oh how i wish we'd accidentally spilled potpourri down the heating grate. Or a scented candle. I checked the other day to see if there would be an easy way to open up that part of our furnace to extract the candle and the one hundred nine years' worth of other objects dropped down the grates (could be some Microsoft stock or something) but unless i want to disturb the asbestos, there isn't. And if there's one thing i learned at college earning a bachelor's degree in art, it's not to disturb the asbestos.