"Oooooh, that smell. Can't you smell that smell?"

The band Lynyrd Skynyrd said it best in their lyrics, "Ooh, ooh that smell. Can't you smell that smell? Ooh, ooh that smell. The smell of death surrounds youuuuu..." And my god, does it surround me. About one month ago, my boyfriend and I woke up not to the smell of coffee brewing... oh no... no Folgers in our cup... no, we woke up to a horrific stench emanating from our heating vents. So far we've tried everything.

1.) Turning off the heaters, which was fine until the temperature in Music City dropped to below 20 degrees at night.

2.) Pest control. Just a few weeks after the smell set in a mouse appeared in our house. We thought, "that's it!" The same thing happened to me in the Santa Cruz dorms. They had to pry the mouse corpse out of the wall and soon things returned to normal (i.e. the smell of dirty socks, cheap perfume and marijuana.) Turns out, however, that our Nashville mouse was a fluke. We did manage to catch some possums living under our house (they were set free elsewhere for all you animal lovers) and my cat, Jade, will never forget the day her stuffed mousy came alive and scuttled across the room (don't worry, we set that critter free, too.)

3.) We recycled that gigantic collection of molding glass in our laundry room (you have to take it to the recycle plant), but all that did was give me more room to dance as I fold clothes.

4.) The plumber thought we may have a sewage leakage somewhere. Nope, we don't. And that theory sounded so good!

5.) We had workers clean up and attend to the mold growing on the ceiling in my bathroom. Nope, not the source either.

6.) Ignore it. This is the step my boyfriend and roommate have now implemented. And I don't blame them. What else can we do? We live in the stinky house now. The one people make excuses not to come over to. We buy candles (the plug-ins just made it worse, yuck) and burn incense and try not to gag. "Oh no..." we tell friends, "it's not our house. It's the construction down the street. Open sewage line." Hell, maybe it is. Or maybe it's a haunting. We haven't tried an exorcist yet. Does anyone have a good number for one? I'll try anything once.