I came home from Auckland recently to have my darling wife inform me something under our house was dead, in a tone which suggested that I would be the one retrieving whatever it was.
Apparently, a smell had been wafting through the house for past few days, while I had been away, and was getting worse.
I was slightly surprised that our 9-year-old had not volunteered to investigate.
He likes dead stuff, in that non-morbid naturally fascinated way that young boys have about them.
Often, the highlight of his trip to his grandad's is either that he found something dead or killed something. Eels, rabbits and pukeko are generally at great risk within a 1km radius of he and his granddad.
I've sat down with him more than once and reminded him that whatever he kills, he eats (my son, not granddad).
Once we established that the "eat what you kill" rule didn't extend to dead stuff he finds, he was fine with it.
Anyway, the reason he hadn't gone under the house in search of the dead thing was because, I suspect, it stunk. The smell had permeated the entire house.
Initially, I advised my wife that she was smelling things. You know, much in the way that you can be guilty of seeing things. Or hearing things.
Truth be known, I was reluctant to go under the house, it smelt so bad. Plus I was en route to a Christmas function, and I was wearing whites. I didn't want dead thing gunk all over my whites. It was a bowls Christmas function, by the way, and I'll write about how much I suck at bowls next Saturday.
So overnight, I avoided entering the wee door, adhered to the "you're smelling things" line and came home from work the next day hoping the smell had gone.
It had worsened. Considerably.
I now had a duty to investigate, particularly since the neighbour's cat has occasionally snuck under our house, and accidentally had the door shut on him.
Rehearsing how I was going to tell the neighbour about his dead cat, I took a deep breath, and in I went.
It didn't take long to work out that the smell was coming from a rubbish sack - a rubbish sack I had filled with two fish skeletons after filleting them on Sunday, before disappearing off to Auckland for work for a few days.
I removed the rubbish sack rather sheepishly, apologised and that night we sat down outside on our deck, over a glass of wine, taking in the gorgeous summer evening scents of wisteria and fish guts that I had buried in our herb garden a few days earlier.
Ahhh, good times.