Right in Front of Your Nose

Right in front of your nose. 

Now my mother would kill me if she knew I was getting ready to disclose this information. I remember getting scolded once for announcing to the neighborhood that we were having hotdogs for dinner. She was all about keeping things within the family and not broadcasting our personal information. 

Now the other day I noticed an unusual odor coming from the pantry. I sniffed around a little, but to no avail, so I asked my husband with his highly refined olfactory abilities for some assistance. He sniffed around as well, and concurred about the odor, but not its origin. His solution was for me to remove everything from the pantry shelves to determine the culprit. My immediate thought was that there were about a million other things I'd rather be doing then emptying out the pantry. 

What I was able to detect, though, was that the odor seemed to be coming from the bottom half of the pantry. Everytime I reached down I would get a whiff of the unpleasant smell.  I rummaged around looking for possibilities, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. And then it occurred to me that the smell actually was coming from right in front of my nose. The guilty party was the terra cotta garlic pot sitting on the shelf. Inside I found a recently purchased pod of garlic which reeked to high heaven! It quickly made its way into the nearby trash and voila, problem solved. 

After giving it a little reflection, it occurred to me that the solution to my problem was literally right before my nose. Sometimes starting with the most obvious solution might be the smartest way to go.