This one's for you, honey

Every time I even start to talk about when I moved in with one of my old roommates, Jorma stops me and politely says, “Yeah, you already told me about the skin”. That’s his way of hoping that I don’t repeat the story. He doesn’t want to hear it again. But I lived through it and I’m not sure that I’ve told anyone else, except Shane who intervened later that evening to help me move some heavy stuff. So I thought I’d share it with you all. Nothing like making the entire internet gag.

My old roomie is a fantastic guy and when I needed a new place to live, he was more than happy to rent out one of the rooms in the three bedroom house that he was living in alone. It was cool for me to bring the dog and two cats, he had two dogs of his own, the rent was decent and I trusted him not to try to turn the arrangement into anything that it wasn’t. I looked forward to having a male platonic roommate, for reasons of safety and just a general change of scene.

The day that I moved in was the Friday before 4th of July weekend. New Roomie was at the beach but had given me the go ahead to move into the house, which worked as an added bonus since I could watch the other dog, he didn’t take with him. She was a Carin Terrier with a severe skin condition. She had eczema and almost no hair. Sadly, she very closely resembled Yoda.

When I first brought in my first load of stuff, I noticed the smell. I had noticed a smell when I came in to look at the house a few weeks before, but thought it was the same sort of smell you might expect in a frat house… it just needed to be thoroughly scrubbed. I was willing to do the scrubbing - after all I had all weekend. Once I had all of my stuff in my room, I decided I could no longer stand the smell and started cleaning the den.

I started by sweeping. I had a pretty good pile, but was trying to be thorough so I started sweeping up the corner where the two sofa’s met. The smell was stronger there, and as I was sweeping I noticed a good bit of coarse grey matter. I moved one of the sofas and swept where there was more of the mysterious sand waiting to be swept. Soon, I had the sand all around me and stuck to the bottom of my feet, as I was barefoot. At this point, I still thought I might be standing in crumbed cement, so I wasn’t bothered that the bottoms of my feet were covered in this mysterious substance.

I was baffled. It seemed like the smell and the sand had some sort of correlation. I bent down and scooped up some on a piece of paper. I observed. Once of the pieces of sand had a piece of hair coming from it. A hair follicle actually. I think then I knew what it was, but my mind would not accept it. Suddenly my feet started itching. As if on cue, the dog trotted out from behind the sofa, sat a few feet in front of me and started scratching, causing a rain of dry, sand-like dog skin to come raining down around her.
I gagged. I was standing in a pile of dog skin. I immediately started wiping off my feet on the side of the broom bristles, and raced into the kitchen. I climbed up onto the counter and scrubbed my feet with anti-bacterial soap. I washed my legs. I filled the sink with warm soapy water and a little bit of bleach and soaked my feet. I changed clothes. I sat down on the couch and cried. What had I gotten myself into?

The situation was such that I really didn’t have a whole lot of options. I scrubbed and scrubbed, aired out the house, Febreezed, burned scented candles, but we could just never get the smell to go completely away. It had been absorbed into the hardwood floors and paneling in the house. The fact that the dog liked to show her distress by urinating and pooping on the floor also didn’t help the smell. Eventually after I moved out, the terrier died and he was able to get the house under control. In the end it wasn’t so bad. There’s nothing like being able to make your husband gag just by saying the words, “dog skin”.