Smells like love

Get your mind out of the gutter, you.

I have a good friend who doesn’t own dogs. He doesn’t dislike dogs, he just likes cats better. That’s fine. But sometimes, he cracks me up by saying, upon entering my house, that he’s not used to the smell of dogs anymore, and he kind of wrinkles his nose. Now, my dogs have regular baths. Neither of them are actually stinky. But dogs do, in fact, have a distinct smell. It’s warm and furry and a little musty, even a day after a bath. (Well, except for my sweet girl Idgie, whose fur smelled like sunshine even in the winter.)

I LOVE that smell. I can’t sleep, so I’m sitting on the couch messing around with my computer. Jack and Crystal are on the couch, sleeping next ot me. Jack has his nose tucked behind me, into the small of my back. That’s one of his favorite sleeping positions.

Every now and then, I bend down and bury my nose in one or the other’s fur. Then maybe I lie on the hapless pup like a pillow for awhile. They never seem to mind. And yes, I can smell them. They smell like love.

Which is not to say kittehs don’t smell wonderful too. In fact, Fenris likes to comment that Johnny "still has that new-cat smell." He does have very nice and fragrant fur. He was a very good sport about letting me cuddle him like a teddy bear after my surgery.

Hell, I even love the way ferrets smell. Okay not when they blast you with their musk glands, but just in their natural, ferrety state.

And rats. For some reason, their fur often smells like corn meal.

Opossums have the most beautiful animal scent I’ve ever encountered. Every last one of them. They smell like ripe fruit and rich earth, like fertile farmland after an early spring rain. I admit it. I sniffed every possum I ever lived with at any opportunity.

Sometimes I wonder how long an animal’s scent can linger in your home. Our precious possum Spike lived with us 13 years ago. He ran loose in the house for the most part. He and Carmen and Idgie were friends. His favorite place to sleep during the day was a corner cabinet in the kitchen, very deep and dark with lots of space. He’d go to the very back to nap, but he’d come running if I called his name, or especially if he heard me opening a can. He always RILLY RILLY hoped it was Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli.

Now Johnny likes to sleep in there. I wonder if he can smell any traces of Spike, and if so, what he thinks about that. He likes possums. He was BFFs with my friend Holly’s adorable mutant possum Trooper.

Once I took care of a severly injured, big old boy poss I named Splat. Well, because he’d been splattered by a car. I kept him in my downstairs bathroom for the first few days I had him, before I found a vet who would look at him. Poor baby, he died in surgery to fix his broken jaw. But the bathroom smelled like ripe fruit and rich earth for weeks, even after I’d cleaned the floor. (Yeah, I do that occasionally.) It was like having a sweet ghost in the house, a gentle reminder of a quiet little life we tried to save.