The curious case of the popcorn phantom

Mystery, romance, and animal invasions

“Ah, the genet’s been here,” Dave announces as we walk into the kitchen.

“How do you know?” I ask, momentarily puzzled, and then the scent reaches me too: hot buttered popcorn with a hint of Niknaks. Not an unpleasant smell, really, as long as you don’t allow yourself to think too much about the anal glands it came from.

We’ve been haunted by this smell for almost a year now – roughly since my dog died, although neither of us made that connection until recently. I’d smell it on the odd morning when I’d stumble into the kitchen to make coffee, strongest by the kitchen counters, clinging to my sleeve if I so much as brushed against any surface. Or we’d come home from a night away and be met by a welcoming but inexplicable waft of popcorn. For a few days the smell would linger and we would sniff about the house like olfactory detectives, throwing out any suspicious-looking food, frantically wiping down the counters. At one point I was sure the rice we left out overnight was to blame. Another time I thought the dishcloth had started fermenting. Dave blamed my homemade apple cider vinegar. I blamed his old pair of boots. After a few days the smell would begin to dissipate and we’d forget all about it – until about a month later, when it would mysteriously return.

Then a few weeks ago, very much in the middle of the newest round of what’s-that-smell, I read a novel about a perfume-maker with a pet civet. It turns out that for centuries, civets made very important contributions to the perfume industry by way of their anal secretions. In fact, for some perfumiers they still do.

And civets are related to genets. And a genet, we know, has been coming into our house at night to forage for leftovers. We welcome it: For one, it keeps the roof rats in check. But also, we both have a massive animal-shaped hole in our hearts after Woud (our dog) died, and genets are intolerably cute. Sleek, alert, supremely confident, with small spotted body and massive stripey tail, genets are basically the most winning combination of cat, leopard, and ferret. We’ve surprised ‘our’ genet in the kitchen more than once, and hear it almost every night. Sometimes it crashes among the pots and pans loudly enough to wake us. One morning I got up to find that it had managed to unearth the pizza I had buried underneath a pile of other boxes with a stone on top (the fridge was full, okay). It steals avocado peels from the compost bin and licks all the last bits of flesh out before leaving the peels strewn about the place. A couple weeks ago it stole a block of butter off the counter, while we were eating in the next room.

Back to the smell. Upon reading that novel about the perfumier, in what can only be described as a stunning feat of deduction, I suddenly thought to myself: What if the funky smell is genet spray? And so I googled “what does genet pee smell like?” Google was a bit confused by my question, but eventually it came up with this answer: “The urine and scent marking of the Cape genet has a distinctive popcorn-like aroma. Studies have attributed this scent to a chemical compound called 2-AP.”

We couldn’t find any signs of actual urine in the kitchen, leading us to believe the smell comes mainly from gland secretions, which, according to Google, means that our genet is likely a female. We have named her, a bit unoriginally, Gennie. Apparently, genets will perform handstands or rub their rear-ends against high objects to mark their territory as widely as possible. Now, every time we hear a bump in the kitchen, I imagine Gennie standing on her front paws, trying to rub her butt against our spice rack.

I’m not foolish enough to try to tame a wild animal, nor do I imagine that Gennie thinks of us as anything other than convenient food-distributors who live in her territory. But I have to admit: I feel flattered that she has decided to declare so loudly that our house is her house. It’s the same blend of reluctant pride I feel when a bushbuck eats all the leaves off my fruit tree saplings, or even when a monkey sneaks into the house and steals the very first ripe blueberries off my one and only plant (which I’d kept inside to prevent exactly that). For so long I craved a life that would be less isolated from other living beings, and now that I have it, I am almost embarrassingly thrilled.

His first encounter with a paparazzo.

What I want, what I really really want, is to be a non-invasive part of this ecosystem, co-existing with other creatures in the cautious but synergistic manner of living beings everywhere. I listened to a podcast a few years ago where the interviewee, who lives alone in a tent somewhere in Turkey, talked about leaving her pots and plates outside all night and waking to find them licked clean by the host of small creatures living around her. That struck me as such a beautiful image that I still think about it today: Not turning wild creature into bona fide domestic animals, but allowing them to lick the odd plate, to steal the occasional berries, to raid the compost heap. Chasing the monkeys away in exasperation, knowing that they’ll return, them knowing I’ll chase them away again, neither gaining the upper hand, but establishing a begrudging rapport in the process.

If it sounds like I’m romanticising nature – I definitely am. And I’m okay with that.

I fall in love with startling regularity, whether with a person, an idea, or even a landscape. For most of my life, these falling-in-loves have served as an escape from reality. All of my schoolgirl crushes were on boys who seemed aloof and mysterious, and getting to know them was always a surefire antidote to my fantasies. For example, at eight years old I was besotted with a boy in my class, Fabien – skinny, nerdy-but-popular, quiet, to me he seemed to float in a world above the pettiness and mundanity of the schoolground. He looked… wise. I wrote reams of passionate poetry about him, which I hid under my mattress. I fantasised about the day our eyes would meet across the classroom and he would recognise me as a kindred soul. I planned our entire life together. Then one day I was walking on the playground when I heard a loud fart behind me. When I looked back only Fabien was there. The romantic hero of my dreams had farted out loud, and then betrayed himself further by looking embarrassed about it. Needless to say, I fell instantly out of love.

The point I am trying to make is that there is a kind of romanticising which is all about escaping the here-and-now. More often than not, that is the kind of romanticising I have done – the breathless kind, where the object of my fantasy becomes everything good and wonderful and unattainable in the world, where the desire to be seen and found worthy by them is an exquisite kind of agony. Even regular grownup falling-in-love contains large doses of this, which we then spend the first few years of a relationship awkwardly trying to merge with the reality of the actual person we are with. Exasperation and fantasy make strange bedfellows, but at one point or another, we all wrestle with this unlikely pairing.

Recently I’ve come to think that the best cure for this kind of ungrounded fantasy isn’t harsh reality, but rather another dose of romance. A re-romancing, if you will, of the everyday. There is so much to learn about anyone or anything, and so much that I might already know but will never fully understand. Therein lies the appeal: This being who is not me, this other creature, is an entire universe. There is no need for me to cast Dave as the mysterious hero, or to concoct elaborate myths about him. He will always be frustratingly, unfathomably not-me. And I get to be entertained and puzzled by the way he judges movies by their soundtracks, by the fact that he re-heats his coffee then lets it get cold again, by the mystery behind why he never remembers to return the lid to anything he opened.

Romance is curiosity. And when it comes to nature, which is just another word for the entire living world, there is really no end of things to be curious about. I am constantly surprised by how learning about anything simply paves the way for more questions. In the case of the genet, for instance: Great, I’ve solved the puzzle of the smell. But now I want to know, how does she mark her territory? Does she do it because there are other genets in the area? Is she even a she? Have I been chopping onions on genet pee?

And so, yes, I am engaging in wilful romanticising of (almost) everything around me. I wonder if trees feel pain when we ringbark them. I read about the love lives of snails. I talk to spiders. I read, and ask questions online, and try to mimic bird calls, and sometimes I even imagine that the forest loves me back. And in the process, I restore my relationship with the living world. I learn to tread more lightly. I become aware – and humbled – in a way that no amount of learning scary facts about climate change could do. Relationships do that: They change our minds from the inside out, more subtly and permanently than mere ideology. I can’t wait to see how this wilderness will continue to change me.

This painted reedfrog lived on our balcony for a while, and changed colour as the day progressed. Eventually he became white with orange spots.

***

And now, for some things that delighted or interested me these past weeks:

• Small birds, including Cape whiteyes and sunbirds (of which we have a lot) bind together their nests with spider silk. Here’s a lovely article about that.

• I saw this on Facebook and had to fact-check it, because it sounded too wonderful to be true (it is true): Gorillas in the wild sing little food songs when they eat.

• After a long hiatus from Youtube, critic and author Lindsey Ellis is back, with a video that blew me away. It’s about the Beatles, but it’s also about the cult of genius, about “difficult” women, and about being an artist.

• I told you a few weeks ago about my friend Jess’s playlists. I like to jump on my mini-trampoline to her newest playlist, and there stumbled upon this song, by Riviere Monk. It quickly turned my trampoline-jumping into dancing in the kitchen, and I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since.

• Dave has a new video out, and I am reminded that he is one of my favourite musicians ever. He made it in collaboration with Fairy Folk ‘n Roll, an initiative that showcases local musicians’ work in the most intimate and loving of settings. More beautiful things to come, so please follow their channel if you like what you see so far.

• This article, written by a lifelong climate activist, bemoans the lack of romance in our interactions with nature far more than I feel confident to do. I don’t agree with everything he says, but still found this a stirring read, and a useful addition to how I understand and engage with the living world.

• And finally: I am busy reading Rooted, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. I’m not finished so technically I can’t recommend it yet, but so far it is speaking straight to my heart. It’s about many of the things I write about in this post, actually; about the place where science and magic meet, about ecology, myths, and romance, and about relationship with the entire living world. Here’s a quote from the book (one of many) that moved me:

  “Walking within this ecological/mystical perspective, a wanderer who finds a feather on a woodland pathway sees not only the bird it once clothed but the forest that sustained the bird, the clouds, the rain, the sun, the seeding darkness. She sees the stars. She sees that her life and that of the feather-bird are indissolubly connected.”