What makes a haunted house (or at least it’s physical world steward) happy? A brand new, sparkling clean checkerboard floor, that’s what! Doing the happy dance now that we have a charming and fittingly vintage-looking floor in the summer kitchen, back hall, and back bath. The pretty antique stove can return from its backyard exile, the clothes dryer can be brought in from the porch, and I have already gotten the pie table and Christmas cactus set up by the window.
Apparently, Leon kept an eye on the remodeling work. When I arrived home yesterday, the floor polishers were just finishing up. One of the guys said, “Did you know your house is haunted?”
I said “Yes,” and asked him what Leon had done to let them know he was around. He told me that the dryer vent kept flapping loudly while they worked and the smoke detector went off several times. Now Leon has “spoken” to me before with the smoke detector ~ in that instance (which was years ago), I sensed Leon’s presence in the back hall and asked if he was there. The smoke detector responded with a few quiet beeps. I told Leon hello, thanked him for his help with the house, and waited to see if the detector would keep beeping. It didn’t and the battery did not need to be replaced for months after that.
The other funny thing is that the fellow who actually installed the new floor ~ a man of very few words ~ must have had the same experience that the floor polishers did, because when I arrived home after his first day working here, the smoke detector cover was sitting on the summer kitchen counter and the battery was pulled out enough so that it wouldn’t work. Neither Dudley nor I have heard the smoke detector alarm go off or even chirp for years. We even tested the battery last week to make sure it worked before putting the smoke detector back together.
It made me happy to know that Leon was watching over the work and the house and letting the guys know, in a friendly way, that he was here.
