Several weeks ago, just when the summer was kicking into high gear my next-door neighbor came bustling over for a visit. I had never met her, or even seen her before, but she seemed very excited to see me. I soon discovered why.

She was having some work done on the exterior of her house, and wanted to know if it was OK if the workers occasionally used our driveway, which abuts her property, instead of hers, which is on the other side.

Although we would soon discover that the workers weren't doing anything much on the side of the house that faces our place—good news, right?—I said yes to the use of the driveway.  I mean, what else was I gonna say? The neighborly thing to do is to say, oh, sure, yeah. No problem.

"It'll only be three weeks anyway," she said, with a boisterous laugh. "Just a minor inconvenience!"

No problem, I assured her.  No problem at all.

She started down the steps from our porch, and then turned back all the sudden.

"I almost forgot!" She giggled. "They're going to be delivering a—what do you call those things... a port-o-potty thingy tomorrow morning sometime before nine! Bye now!"

I was like, say what?

"Oh, it's just a teensy-weensy little thing. They'll probably put it in the back yard, but they'll need your driveway for access, 'kay?"

Well, whatever, I thought.

But when they delivered the port-o-potty, they stuck it in the side yard—in front of our neighbor's back fence, on a wall with no windows looking out on it from her place, but a great view of it from several windows of ours—the big bay window in our dining room, included—and it was not ten feet from our barbecue pit with our brand new gas grill in it.

Well, I'll be jiggered, I thought.

Still, what are you gonna do? And it would only be there for three weeks. She specifically said "three weeks."

Yes, there was that faint whiff of port-o-potty waste and chemicals brewing in the mid-summer heat. But you can get to used to that, right? Those port-o-potty chemicals remind me a little of a whore bath. They don't eliminate the stink, they simply transform it into a more complex, chemically-altered stink, slightly less offensive to the nose, but possibly more offensive to the brain.  Because the brain knows there's fecal matter in there, no matter how you dress it up.

When I was taking care of my dad in the last months of his life, we had a commode for him, next to his bed. We used to spray an air freshener after he used it, but this seemed to me to succeed only in creating a bouquet of unpleasant odors, rather than just eliminating the one unpleasant odor you wanted gone. The air freshener had a sugary, faintly fruity smell. It was kind of like chewing Hubba Bubba in an outhouse.

But it wouldn't be long before the port-o-potty would be gone and we'd be back in business, right? Three weeks, right? That's what she said. "Three weeks."

Well, it's been two months now, and it's almost time to put away the grill. All of our cookouts this summer have been in the shadow of the port-o-potty, which looms over all proceedings, lending them its faintly fruity, but unmistakably egestive odor. Like Death waiting in the wings for a hot dog.

And it's still there.

In fact, just now, right in time for lunch, they came to empty it.

Shouldn't there be some sort of moratorium on emptying those things between the hours of noon and one? It's one of those smells—like dirty diapers—that once unleashed, clings to everything.

Hours later, you come home, and you're like, "what's that smell? Honey? Do you smell that smell?"

"Oh, you and your old smells!"

I was sitting in the dining room having a little something to eat when the truck started backing in. I thought it was the truck that delivers heating oil, and wondered if this was the time of year for it.

Once they started emptying the port-o-potty I had to close all the windows, leave the room, and close the doors to the dining room, too, fleeing to the other side of the house.

But it's too late. Now the smell is everywhere.

And to top it all off, I was walking down our street the other day, and said hi to my neighbor, and little Miss Port-o-potty here, whose stink we've all been living in all summer acts like she doesn't even know me!

Some neighbor, eh?