Rotten Potato

One day a very long time ago my mom told me that a rotten potato was one of the worst messes to have and that once I had one I would understand. For those of you have not had a rotten potato, it is an experience you won't forget.

One lone potato escapes its prison bag and rolls to the back of the pantry. One day you notice a smell, as the days pass it gets worse and you can't find the source of the smell. Finally, you remove everything from the pantry floor until you find the awful, sloppy, horror that is the rotten potato. You clean it up, but you can't get the smell out of your head as the days pass you think you must be imagining the smell. You're not. So you go to clean it again and find that some of the nasty goop had seeped onto a box nearby and you clean it and dispose of the box and yet you still imagine the smell is there. Then weeks will go by and yet again you will catch a faint wiff of the smell, so again you go through the pantry, you take out all the boxes and yes there is one small corner of a box that was missed. And again you clean it up. And even when you know that it is clean and the mess is gone and it is not possible for you to smell that horrible scent, somedays you still think you can. It sneeks up on you when you know your house is clean and you've been cleaning all day and the house smells of wonderful clean smells.


I have a rotten potato in my life. I've cleaned it up, I've done the work and I think its gone. Life is so good is has to be gone. Most days I feel satisfied and even blissful, but then one day I get a wiff of that rotten potato that has been gone for so long and I catch a wiff of it for a few days and then one day I open that pantry and it is like the potato snuck back in and can't be cleaned up. And it follows me and sometimes I can't smell it, but if I take a moment to breath, it is there haunting me, teasing me with its relentless goo, stuck to me like glue. I can't get rid of it, why did it come back? It should be gone, why isn't it gone yet? I'm sure it will go away again, it always does. I just wish it would stay away for good. I'm tired of it sneaking into my life and dragging me down.


There are wonderful scents all around me, but all I can smell is the potato. I can pretend to smell them, I can want to smell them, but I can't really smell them.