There’s a strange smell in our house this morning.

We have a dog and several cats, so I have a good idea what it is, but I don’t know with certainty. I mean, it’s almost certainly poop, but there’s a vanishing chance it’s something not-poop. (Once, at the old house, a squirrel got into the attic and died of causes unknown. Several weeks later, after we had taken to calling the office room upstairs “the room of death” because of the smell — which we could not for the life of us locate — I got up to the attic and found the unfortunate critter in a partial state of decomposition. The surprising thing was how crispy it was. I went up with rubber gloves and garbage bags and an oversized roll of paper towels to take on the cleaning task, but I was able to lift the poor thing by the tail (it stood up in my gloved hand like a stick) and dispose of it without much fuss.) Could be a cat hairball, but those don’t smell so much as lie in wait for your bare feet to step in.

No, this is poop, and it’s waiting for me to find it.

And let’s be clear, I don’t want to find it.

What I want is to be wrong: the smell is not a poop on the floor, but rather a poop in the appropriate place that our fatter, lazier cat has failed to cover up. Or maybe the dog farted and it’s just, I mean, awful, but it’ll go away soon. Or maybe it’s that funky coffee brew my wife has that tricks my nose sometimes. (I usually love the smell of coffee — though I hate the taste — except for this one brand she buys that smells like pet defecation. She thinks I’m crazy for this, but I can’t help what I smell.)

I also don’t want to get up and look for the source of the smell. I want to not know the source, because if I get up and find it, and it is what I know it is, then I will have to clean it. And on this beautiful Saturday morning, the last thing I want is to clean up poop.

Unfortunately, what I want to be true and what is true are two concepts with little regard for each other. There is definitely poop somewhere, and that poop is going to have to be cleaned, no matter how much I would rather bury my head in the sand and sit on the couch and pretend life is normal.It’s here somewhere, no matter how much I want to sit and enjoy the sun streaming through the windows or to go and sit down at a restaurant or to not have to wear a mask when I go out in public, and people are getting sick and dying no matter how much some of us want to pretend that it’s okay and WHOOPS MY WHOLE METAPHOR BROKE DOWN THERE DIDN’T IT.

There’s poop in the house and if we all pretend there isn’t, it’s gonna pile up until we can’t pretend anymore.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.