Skunk Days of Summer
This month I think I’ve encountered (for some definitions of “encounter”) more skunks than I ever have before. Not that I’ve been sprayed myself, thankfully, but I’ve certainly been a lot more aware of them, so to speak.
For one thing, there’s at least one skunk - and I think it’s more like a family - that lives in the apartment complex. A couple weeks back I was coming home from the lab late one night and there was a skunk sitting on the doorstep of the building. He looked at me; I looked at him and was suddenly glad that there’s another door on the opposite side of the building.
One of my labmates has a dog; this dog has twice this month run across a skunk, including first thing yesterday morning. She got to spend the whole morning washing him, and showed up for group meeting a bit late and with a faint odor of animal brimstone… not that any of us mentioned it, of course. Much.
And then, driving home from the store today, there was a dead skunk in the road, that I just barely missed… 30 miles per hour is too slow to drive past a freshly killed skunk with the windows rolled down on a warmish day. I don’t think 90 would’ve been fast enough. Maybe that was the neighbor-skunk. Mwahahahahah.