For the first time in what feels like eternity, the Sun peaked its face around some clouds this past week and introduced the people of Philadelphia once more to its gentle warmth and comforting embrace. Winter’s cold grasp and early Spring’s grey doldrums has departed for now and the evidence is everywhere. In South Philadelphia Old men and women sit on their front steps and smoke, passing casual complaints back and forth in the time honored fashion. In newly green parks, girls wearing two-piece bathing suites sun themselves while their little dogs, finally free of those embarrassing doggy sweaters, frolic and yap. And in my apartment, the return of warmth and sunlight brought with it another seasonal visitor; the animal stench of this fraying couch. Migratory scientists have long postulated that my apartment’s stench winters in chicken coups and guinea pig clutches throughout South America, returning home to mate only when temperature rise above 70°F.  All winter long the fraying couch, upholstered in faded wine red and feathery flowering vines, stored spilled drinks, food crumbs, sweat, and shed skin cells in preparation feed the returning stench of spring and its ravenous clutch of young. Those who know say that this year promises to be especially fetid due to a variety of factors, most prominently the hockey and basketball playoffs, but also the couch’s infirm condition, which makes any attempt at washing it impossible. One weathered apartment dweller, wearing the trademark overalls and straw hat agreed to speak to us anonymously. “Now there’s some that’ll mix in all kind’s of new fangled chemicals and growth agents into their apartment stench, that’s not for me. Sure, bong water and Mountain Dew will get you stench in the middle of winter, but you can’t live with one of those frankensmells. That’s why I do it the old fashioned way. You do it the right way, god’s way, and by mid July you’ll have the kind of smell that turned our earliest ancestors into nomads. Yep, when that thar couch get’s to smelling like a gym sock and well cured hay, well that’s when you know yer in fer a big year, stench wise that is.” As of press time this reporter was outside, taking some deep breaths.