One afternoon last week I came home to a bustling home as usual. As I put away my work things, Kelly asked me if I smelled anything. I took a few whiffs and smelled something, but couldn’t readily identify it. She thought it smelled like natural gas, but I was in the midst of a cold and wasn’t the best judge of anything at that point.
We turned our attention to dinner and then put the kids to bed. As she and I were in the den, we again smelled the smell. Befuddled, we both searched the house for all the usual suspects. Our dishwasher is notorious for stinky smells, so I bravely stuck my head into it to find it wasn’t the culprit. I searched the garage (the home of our water heater) and came up empty. Ditto for the gas fireplace. Checked the dog but he wasn’t it. The smell was in our bedroom, so I searched around there, but nothing. I even turned on the heat and sniffed the vents.
Nope. None of them.
The smell didn’t seem to be coming from any one place: it was just everywhere … and nowhere at the same time. I decided early on it didn’t smell like natural gas as Kelly first thought, but had a more petroleum smell to it. Oily.
As I settled into bed, I wondered if this was another one of those phantom smells I sometimes smell, like how I smelled phantom cigar smoke during the Capitol Ghost Hunt (and how I sometimes smell cigarette smoke at home for no real reason). It didn’t make any sense, though. While I couldn’t find any physical source for the smoke, I certainly couldn’t come up with any non-physical reason for it, either.
Just as an exercise, I put the question to myself as I was falling asleep: who might I know that recently died an oily death?
Then it clicked: a neighbor in a nearby neighborhood died in a tragic fiery death last month when the kerosene heater he was refueling exploded, burning him and destroying his home. The smell we were smelling was of kerosene. But why us? We never met the man or his widow. Why would he visit us?
It turns out that another neighbor was trying to get donations for this man’s widow. She had mentioned Kelly’s name in an email that day as someone coordinating the collection (which was, actually, a surprise to Kelly). I wonder if the man decided to visit in an effort to look after his wife.
Regardless of the cause of the phantom smell, I woke the next day determined to rally the neighborhood for support of this woman. I’ve collected many donations, cash, clothes, and furnishings – an outpouring of support that is very touching. If our deceased neighbor wanted to jump-start some charity for his wife, it looks like he succeeded.