The Pantry

 

The Pantry

An active imagination can be a good thing. Or not. In my case, it’s both, but a few nights ago, it was decidedly not a good thing. We have a small pantry in our kitchen above a small broom closet. The pantry consists of two shelves where we store various dry goods: cereal, cans of tomato products and beans, and a number of old yogurt containers with nuts, dried beans, and grains. I first noticed the smell while reaching into the cupboard for some crackers. I wrinkled my nose at the foul odor. I stood there for a few seconds contemplating what it might be, but then I stuck my head further in and took a big sniff and the smell was gone. I grabbed the box of crackers and went back to fixing myself a snack.

A couple of nights later, while watching TV, I went back to the cupboard for a cookie. There was the smell again. There was no mistaking it this time and it wasn’t going away. We were almost ready to go to bed. That is decidedly a bad time to start thinking about what might be causing a bad smell in your kitchen. The end of the day is when my energy level bottoms out and pulling everything off the shelves was definitely not something I was willing to tackle. We vowed to deal with the cupboard in the morning. But I couldn’t let it go. I lay in bed and started cycling through the possibilities.

Unfortunately, one of my first ideas was that something had died up there, like that time I forgot about the mousetrap set in the back of one of the kitchen drawers during an ongoing mouse outbreak. That was another time a smell had alerted us to something being amiss. We pulled the drawer all the way out and were greeted with the unlucky mouse surrounded by dried blood from its demise of who knows how many days before. I tried to put this grisly image out of mind as I kept turning the pages of my book. I was trying to read long enough so I could fall asleep and forget about the smell and what might be causing it. As I was starting to drift off, Anne helpfully mentioned that her brother once had a snake die in the walls of his house, later discovered by the wafting of an unpleasant smell. Toss that image into the hopper of my imagination and I was off and running.

In the insult to injury category, as I lay there with my tumbling thoughts, I heard the scrabbling noise from whatever creature lives in the ceiling of our bedroom. I have theorized that it is a squirrel, although it could easily be a mouse. Either of those is preferable to it being a possum, which most surely it isn’t (it couldn’t be, right?). Months go by where we don’t hear it and then suddenly it comes back to life. Maybe it has gone on a brief vacation somewhere. Somewhere nice and warm like Florida or the Bahamas, where it can get some sunshine. Then it comes back to Vermont and finds its way into our house, scurrying around on just the other side of the sheetrock from where we are sleeping. Sometimes it sounds like chewing and I picture it gnawing through the ceiling, getting closer and closer to dropping through onto our bed, at which point we would jump out and commence the panicked screaming and thrashing.

With impeccable timing “the critter”, as we have named it, chose the night I was already struggling with horrible thoughts to make its reappearance. I knew that tomorrow we would be facing whatever the cupboard held in store and by “we” I meant “me”. I pictured myself standing on the chair that was needed to reach everything on the two shelves. As I pulled out one particularly critical box, whatever was back there, nested in the dark, would leap forward and in my fear I would stumble back off the chair, crashing towards the kitchen floor and most likely hitting my head on something hard on the way down. This could actually be the end of me. Just like that.

The next horrifying option is finding a rat-sized hole in the back of the cupboard that leads down to a giant warren of rats hiding out in our basement. Maybe you remember the movie from the ‘70s called “Willard”. It was about a troubled young man who befriends rats by the thousands who are trained to do his bidding. There is a scene in the movie where the rats are streaming out of their holes and look like a river of rushing water. This scene plays through my mind like I just watched it yesterday.

Maybe it’s a family of mice who somehow ended up in one of the cereal boxes. I will pick up the box and find it to be just a little heavier than it should be. One sniff tells me that this is the source of the problem. I tentatively undo the top, shaking the contents out into a container and the family of mice pours out. If any of them are alive, I will run screaming from the room and find someone else (someone braver) to come deal with this particular horror. At least in that scenario, I get in touch with the cereal company to start discussing the lawsuit I plan to file if they don’t make things right with a tidy sum of money to make me and my very legitimate complaint go away.

Last, but not least, my mind goes to the xenomorph from the first Alien movie. Spoiler alert. You’ll have to skip the rest of this paragraph if you haven’t seen this classic movie and still plan to. Don’t tell me you don’t know what a xenomorph is! In this classic 1990s space thriller, the hapless astronauts are exploring a distant planet. A hibernating creature leaps at the helmet of one of the explorers. After getting him back on board, all seems fine. That is, until the gestating creature is done using him as a host and decides to burst out of his chest in what has to be one of cinema's most dramatic, horrifying and shocking scenes. So, yeah, that could happen when I’m going through the cupboard as well. Is it any wonder I didn’t get much sleep that night?

The next morning comes way too soon. I take a deep breath and try to mentally prepare for whatever awaits me in the pantry. I pull out boxes of cereal, tentatively feeling their weight. Extra boxes of crackers and a few bottles of wine and vinegar all gather on the kitchen table. So far, so good. Nothing has leaped out yet. I start on the top shelf. Cans of tomato sauce and coconut milk stack up on the counter. Why do we have all of these empty yogurt containers? I check several of the yogurt containers filled with lentils, rice, and other dry items and they are all OK. The smell is getting stronger. I start to open the containers of dried beans. I pry back one lid and the sharp smell of decay literally leaps into my face and I reactively close the container. A brief vision of the xenomorph flits through my mind. I go outside with the offending beans and dump them on our mulch pile. The rotten clump of beans plops unceremoniously onto the other refuse, rolling down the slope to rest against the fence. I half expect the clotted mass of beans to start moving towards me, maybe even to take up residence in my body until they reach their full maturity en route to taking over our house. Like I said, a good imagination is a blessing and a curse.