No smoking, please.

The USPS has been pretty good about realizing that we now live at Tara, as most of our mail arrives where it should and we no longer get mail intended for the previous residents. Every now and then, however, we get a piece of mail addressed to one Uri Snellbaker. Seriously. I cannot make this stuff up.

That someone actually named their child Uri Snellbaker is news enough, but the mail sent to Mr. Snellbaker is nothing to sneeze at. We don’t get Uri’s credit card bills or juicy love letters, nor do we get catalogues, high school reunion updates, or temple newsletters. Camel, Virginia Slims, and Marlboro seem to be the only ones who think Uri resides at Tara.

We don’t need Angela Lansbury to clue us in on the fact that Mr. Snellbaker liked a smoke.

But, with apologizes to Ayn Rand,

Who is Uri Snellbaker?

Loving some good gossip, I like to imagine that ol’ Uri was Mrs. Hershey’s lover. (The plot thickens!) Perhaps he was a tobacco tycoon who stole Mrs. Hershey’s heart sometime in the 80s and continued to be her on-again/off-again smoky sweetheart through the next two decades. Maybe he was her brother (boring!) who came to live with her as he endured treatment for emphysema. Maybe he lived next door, but didn’t want his wife to know he smoked, so he had his smoking literature sent to Mrs. Hershey’s? That last one’s too far-fetched, and the second option is boring, so we’re going to go with the juiciest story.

Uri Snellbaker was Mrs. Hershey’s smokin’ suitor, her cigarette courter, her burning beau, her puffing paramour, and her smoldering steady (love thesaurus.com!).

Unfortunately, I didn’t arrive at this conclusion solely as a result of the USPS. No, rather when we bought Tara, it smelled like an ashtray. Being pregnant and hormonal, I told Rhett that if there was one thing I was allowed to pitch a fit about, it was the smell. When the house was made livable, I told him, I was not moving in unless the smell was gone.

I know that fifty years ago no one knew how terrible cigarettes were, and I’ve seen enough Mad Men to realize that times have changed. But seriously. In 2010, a house shouldn’t smell like a bar.

Before we moved in, the smell of cigarettes poured out of every crevice, and as my mother-in-law washed walls her water became quickly tinted with yellow as the decades of smoke began to be freed from the house. Washing the walls and shelves, refinishing the floors, painting the walls, ceilings, and trims didn’t entirely get rid of the stench, and to date our painters have used over 35 gallons of Kilz on the ceilings alone. If this is what smoking does to the inside of a house, I don’t even want to think about what it does to the inside of a body.

As with any home, the smoking stench has mainly subsided and the house has started to smell like us rather than the local bar.

However, every now and then in certain sections of the house I can smell the faint lingering odor of cigarettes. Perhaps because it is Halloween or perhaps because I am a bit of a romantic, I imagine that it is nothing more than Uri coming for his mail.