For weeks I’ve been smelling a skunk. A dead one. It seemed pretty unlikely: there aren’t too many skunks in Brooklyn as far as I know. Especially dead ones.

But still. I kept smelling skunk.

At first, I though it was my boots. I actually took them off and sniffed. They didn’t smell that great. But they didn’t smelll like a skunk.

Then I smelled my nylon knee-highs. Same thing. Not the most fragrant things in the world But no dead skunk.

The smell seemed to follow me around. I smelled it in my bedroom. On the street. In my office. The kitchen. I could be anywhere and I’d smell dead skunk.

In my office, the smell was especially bad. On a few occassions, I emptied out the garbage pail thinking that maybe there was something rotten in there. Then I looked under the couch, behind my desk, the bookcase, and underneath my office mate’s desk, too.

I wondered if, perhaps, there was a dead animal: mouse, or even a rat. But it didn’t really smell like a dead rodent. It smelled like a skunk. A dead one.

When my office mate came in the other day I finally told her about the skunk smell. "Maybe it’s me," she said. But I assured her that I’d been smelling it even when she wasn’t around. She seemed relieved.

Yesterday, I started smelling the dead skunk again. I was in my office and frankly feeling pretty fed up about the whole thing.

So when my office mate came in, we spent a good deal of time sniffing around the room. She looked inside one of my desk drawers, which is an embarassing mess.

"You don’t want to look in there," I said.

"Maybe I do," she said mischeviously.

"Do you smell it in there?" I said excitedly."

"No," she said shutting the drawer.

Then my office mate had a theory: "Maybe it’s the desk chair. Over a month  ago we switched chairs, remember? " she said. "And that’s about when you said you started smelling it, right? " she was being quite the junior detective.

"Yeah, you’re right." I said as I raced to put my nose on the seat of her black office chair:  "It smells like me. It doesn’t smell like a skunk. It smells like me."

We left it at that. I had to get home and she had other things to concentrate on other than searching for the source of the dead skunk smell.

Tonight, watching the video of "Yours, Mine, and Ours," the original with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball, I smelled the skunk again. I was sitting inthe living room, typing on a Dell laptop computer.

"Maybe it’s the computer," I said to myself feeling weary of the whole situation. And then it happened. I suddenly knew where the smell was coming from.

"It’s my watch," I said out loud to the family. "ssssh, we’re watching the movie," Daughter said.

No-one seemed to care very much that I’d discovered the source of the skunk smeel. But I was thrilled.  My new digital watch with the wide striped band I bought at a shop on Spring Street off Lafayette called Pylones for $10.00. The plastic on the watch smells like a dead skunk. I took off the watch and took a long, deep breath.

Yup. Pure, unadulterated skunk.

I got the watch about a month ago, maybe a little more. I wear it every so often. That’s why the smell comes and goes. I only smell it on the days when I wear the watch.

Mystery solved. Now, what do I do with my groovy new $10.00 watch? I really like it but I can’t wear it.

Unless I want to smell dead skunk all the time.