Lessons From a Stinky Morning

There’s a strange poetry found when beauty and ugliness share the same space.

Every morning at around 7:31 a.m., I step out my front door and my senses flood with South Carolina air. This time of year, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s still humid, but in a soft sort of way. Instead of oppressive and hot, it carries a coolness in through the nose and fills the lungs. The birds sing all around, the sun scatters patterns of light through the leaves of hanging vines, and it’s almost perfect—then the scent hits me.

Not necessarily the scent of South Carolina air, just the scent around my house. I can’t explain it, but I catch a subtle yet foul smell almost every morning I go out. It’s almost beautiful how sharply the smell contrasts with the perfect morning scene around me. That’s what I call contrast!

Try to imagine what your local dump smells like, then tone it down about a hundred times. It doesn’t sucker-punch you; rather, it lingers for a moment, then strikes once it’s deep in the lungs.

I can’t exactly explain it either. I don’t catch the smell at any other time of day. My best guess is that the house I live in used to be abandoned and its yard was used as a local dumping ground. Maybe something about the morning air pulls the scent up from the ground?

It’s not easy to spot at first, but if you go into my yard, you’ll find all sorts of trash barely poking up through the grass. Bottles, bits of plastic, and even an old box TV dot the landscape. Like I said, though, I can’t tell if that’s where the smell is coming from. If it is, why only in the mornings?

Fortunately, we’re renting the place. I may never know what causes this strange phenomenon, but I do know I can get out of here at some point—and maybe there’s a lesson in that.

No matter how small the stinky parts of our life are, we don’t have to live with them if we don’t want to. Even if we can’t pinpoint what’s causing them, there’s often a deeper part of ourselves that knows they’re somewhere nearby.

That’s one of the great things about life. When life gives you lemons, you can make lemonade. When it gives you a trash heap, you can get gone or get to cleaning. In fact, I’d say it’s not so much about what’s around you, but what you do with your surroundings. Care to share a time when you made the best with what you had? Leave your experiences in the comments.

Till then, I’ll leave you with a recently found adage of mine:

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without!”