When we had been living in our house for a few years, our next door neighbor greeted me over the fence, Wilson Wilson style. “Did you know you had a skunk living under your front porch?”

No, I didn’t. But we smelled skunk with some regularity, so it didn’t surprise me.

When I was a kid, we had a skunk living under our front porch. It was a white skunk with a black stripe, which was in keeping with my need to be different. So I was a little enchanted to find that as an adult with my own home (a bungalow very like the one I lived in growing up) that I also had a skunk living under my porch.

I identified where the skunk was going in and out. We saw it snuffling around the backyard a few times after dark. Early one morning, I discovered that there were two skunks, one mostly black, and one mostly white (fantastic!). One of them and I had a very uncomfortable stand off, with tail raised on its part and terror on mine, before we were finally able to break the tension and make a run for it.

One particularly bad summer, renters in the upstairs apartment next door had a tom cat who scared the skunk nightly. I even called the exterminators. When I asked for a quote, they said the price was Per Skunk, and there was no way to know how many skunks we were dealing with until they went in. If there was a whole family, lots of babies would quickly rack up the costs.

Besides fundamentally taking issue with discrimination against large families, there was no way I was sending someone under my porch to rout the skunk(s) without knowing ahead of time what it was going to cost.

I googled how often skunks can spray. It turns out they can do 6 sprays in quick succession, but then it takes up to 10 days to reload. This made it impossible for all the skunk I was smelling to be My Skunk. But you want to know what I told myself? Now that I knew My Skunk was really Two Skunks, and let’s say they were super skunks and could reload after just a few days. If they were taking turns, maybe that could account for all the smells.

I noticed my other neighbor (not Wilson) also had a skunk trail going under her porch. My story this time? My skunk used her porch when it was feeling threatened by all the foot traffic at our house.

I wasn’t thinking about this all the time, but the nightly spraying meant that at least once a day, I had an reminder to continue to develop my narrative. I really believed on some level, even though it was physically impossible, that every time a skunk sprayed and it was close enough to smell in our house, that it must have been My Skunk.

Then, several months ago, the Chaplain and I started taking nightly walks together. We go 5-6 days a week, 3-4 miles a night. Our walks take us around our local neighborhood, through parks, and downtown.

What surprised me about these dusk excursions is the number of skunks we’ve seen.

Far from our house being the only one on our street with a skunk, there are countless skunks, in every combination of black and white, scurrying across sidewalks, around shrubbery, and underneath porches.

The first time I saw a skunk on one of our walks, I thought, oh, a skunk. It reminded me of nighttime walks with my sister as a teenager, when we had regular skunk sightings.

By now, I’ve lost track of how many skunks I’ve seen.

It generated a huge shift in perspective, and a valuable metaphor.

My brain went from focusing disproportionately on me and My Skunk and did a huge backward step to see my whole city as a network of people and Their Skunks. And most (all?) of those people don’t feel personally responsible when Their Skunk, which they have no control over, sprays.

How many other things in my life do I feel are my fault (and mine in isolation) where I’m taking responsibility unnecessarily, and I’m one of many, many others in the same position?

How could I have forgotten how ubiquitous skunks are (knowledge I had as a teen living in a tiny rural community) and thought it was just me? How many other Skunks exist in my life?

The photo above is only related because it’s black and white and I’m wearing stripes. Because I’m not getting close enough to ANY of the neighborhood skunks for a photo op. The dress was one my mom wore on her honeymoon (Mom, please fact check).