Longtime readers of this column may recall that I live in a haunted house.
Not haunted as in spectral apparitions and things that go bump in the night; our house is haunted by a poltergeist.
A poltergeist with a sense of humor. He, or she, likes to hide things and snicker at us while we grow increasingly frustrated looking for them.
Recently the specialized screwdriver for our Ring Doorbell disappeared. I dropped it after changing the doorbell’s battery. It bounced off of my shoe, and into oblivion.
“Order a new one,” my wife said. “Then you’ll find the old one.”
Sure enough. The day the new one arrived, the old one magically appeared – in plain sight in the middle of a bedroom floor.
One of the more memorable disappearances was that of my smart phone.
Granted, I’m not great at keeping track of it, often setting it down and forgetting where it is. Annoying, but temporarily so as it’s usually found with a minimum of searching.
This time was different – a maximum of searching. Days of searching! We looked everywhere. You know how it is when you can’t find something and look in increasingly unlikely places? We looked in all the usual places – in the car, in drawers, under beds and couch cushions, then progressed to searching in locations so unlikely as to be ridiculous – the stereo cabinet, the laundry hamper, the freezer … It was as if the earth had swallowed it.
In due time it turned up in a bedroom. Not under the bed or a dresser, but once again right in the middle of the floor. I almost stepped on it.
We’d searched every inch of that room repeatedly, with no sign of it.
There was only one possible explanation. It had to have been the poltergeist.
After a period of relative tranquility – no incidents in months – the vanishings began again last summer with the disappearance of our season tickets to Boise State football games.
The tickets had arrived in the mail. My wife brought them in from the mailbox and handed them to me. I immediately put them in the file where we’ve always kept them.
When we went to get them out … gone. Neither of us had taken them out of the file, nor had anyone else in the family. I looked through the file several times, took everything out of it. There was no doubt that they were gone. Completely, thoroughly, utterly gone.
We looked everywhere. All through the desk drawer that contained the file. All through all of the desk drawers. All through the office containing the desk. All through the house, the wastebaskets, the trash, the recycling bin. Knowing that it was pointless to the point of being absurd, I looked in the garage, the back yard, the refrigerator …
Why, you may ask, would any sane person look in the refrigerator for football tickets? A sensible question, with a not-so-sensible answer. I once found my shoes in the refrigerator.
Absentmindedness? No doubt.
Or maybe I’m not an entirely sane person.
Despite days of intensive searching, marked by increasingly colorful language, the football tickets never were found. Thankfully, the folks at the BSU ticket office were sympathetic and issued us new tickets.
This was far from being the first time that frantic searching had failed to produce missing items. The case of the missing car keys comes to mind.
I’d set the keys on the dining table while doing some paperwork. The paperwork might have taken all of ten minutes. When I went to pick up the keys, they were gone. We did everything but turn the house upside down and shake it looking for them.
This happened soon after we’d moved into our current home – and those keys are still missing more than 30 years later!
This brings us, by means of a smooth and logical transition, to dandelion diggers.
Most people whose homes have yards have a dandelion digger. A dandelion digger that they use every summer. My parents had the same dandelion digger for decades. I have to buy a new one every summer.
This is not because the dandelion diggers are faulty or wear out; it’s because they vanish.
A dandelion digger is not a small thing. It’s not like keys, a cell phone or some other relatively small thing that gets lost and is hard to find because of its diminutive size. Most dandelion diggers are a good 14 inches long, with colorful handles and shiny silver blades. Easy to spot when left lying around the yard.
Except at our house. By my count, four dandelion diggers have disappeared from the premises in about as many years. You’d think I’d see them when mowing the lawn, pruning the bushes or doing other yard work, but no. It’s as if they dematerialize.
As you undoubtedly are aware, Halloween is this week. To prepare for it, I climbed to the attic to get down the spooky decorations that have been stored there for years.
You know what I’m about to tell you, don’t you?
Right. The Halloween decorations were missing.
Halfheartedly, all but certain that it will suffer the same fate, I went online and ordered a spooky looking witch.
Halloween, of course, is the day for celebrating all things ghostly, and perhaps that includes poltergeists. My guess it that, with Halloween over, ours will be feeling generous and return our Halloween decorations.
Just in time for Christmas. As mentioned earlier, he or she has a sense of humor.
Happy Halloween, everyone.
Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.
Tim Woodward 