a kind of graphic post about smelly things, and I talk about the bathroom, so perhaps you may not want to read this one? at a minimum, please consider yourself warned.

Here's a story about a funky fungus and the week I thought I might be pregnant.*

Following the hurricane, I noticed a particularly offensive smell coming from the forsythia bushes at the top of our common green. It was like nothing I'd smelled before, and living with three small children, I've had plenty of opportunity to test that theory. Actually, the kids and their smells feature in this story, too.

Back to the smell: funky. Like death. And do you know what? I'd not seen the rabbits that live in the forsythia bushes since the hurricane. Putting one and one together, I come to the obvious conclusion, which is that the bunnies died in some kind of hurricane-related rabbit hole cave-in, bless their poor twitchy noses.

But the smell! Like most things, I obsessed about it, asking all of our neighbors if they could smell it. Didn't it just reek? Didn't it make them sick? Weren't they worried about what disgustingness was causing smell? No one else seemed as bothered by the smell, so either (1) they're insane or (2) I'm insane or the much more likely (3) there's something peculiar about my sense of smell these days. A red flag was raised.

Around the same time, I couldn't handle our bathrooms any longer. Oh, the smell. So. Much. Pee. It was overwhelming. Unsurprising: two small children, a pretty liberal "mellow yellow" policy, make for a smelly bathroom. Still, it seemed to get pretty terrible as if, magically, overnight. A second red flag was raised.

Second red flag there may be, but there was no second line on the pregnancy test. I'd managed to convince myself that I could be pregnant based only on my super sense of smell - no other symptoms, no other clues, just some olfactory mayhem.

It turns out, our forsythia bushes are full of stinkhorn mushrooms. (These have the colorful name Phallus rubicundus.) And the bathroom? It's just smelly.

Stinky stuff aside, it's surprising how disappointed we are. Even on crazy days, even at the heels of a long and tiring weekend, the sad little "-" that never became a "+" was a letdown.

*But I still had a glass or two of wine, so obviously I wasn't committed.