The Incredible Talking Floor

As most of my family knows, and my husband finds rather amusing, there are times I find it necessary to talk to inanimate objects. On more than one occasion Pa has walked into the kitchen, with a confused look on his face, asking who I'm talking to. That always seems an odd question to me. Isn't it obvious? I'm talking to the dishes! I may be talking to a plate, a glass, an errant piece of silverware that is swimming around in the sink, using every trick it can think of to evade my grasp. Or I may be talking to the dishcloth which has decided to be difficult.

I've been known to talk to my computer, and have had some quite interesting conversations with the vaccuum cleaner. I've even chatted it up with the living room couch.

Yesterday, my ability to communicate with beings that are not normally able to talk back came in handy. Yesterday afternoon, at the inisistance of my son, I found myself talking to the bathroom floor. By now the idea of me talking to the bathroom floor may not seem all that surprising. The really incredible thing about this particular situation was that the bathroom floor was actually talking back to me. Not only that, but I had witnesses! As a matter of fact, both my children joined in on the conversation!

Yes, that's right. My two children, who have never to my knowledge spoken to an inanimate object before, were in the bathroom with me. We all three were gathered around a small area of the bathroom, looking down, talking to the floor. And the floor was talking back to us! Not only was the floor talking back to us but, perhaps thinking we couldn't understand floor language, it was tapping out a code of some sort! Now, I've never had a seemingly lifeless form actually talk back to me, so naturally, I was anxious to hear what the floor had to say! Turned out the bathroom floor had a request. There was something it felt it needed and it needed my help in acquiring it!

It began by asking me if the knocking sound was where I wanted it. To tell you the truth, I wasn't really sure I wanted a knocking sound placed anywhere in my bathroom, but it seemed quite insistent and it was being kind enough to offer me a choice, so I responded by letting it know the approximate area the knocking seemed to be coming from. It wasn't happy with that location, so it knocked in another area. I wasn't thrilled with that location, right at the base of the sink cabinet, and so our knocking game continued.

I told the floor perhaps it would be better nearer the wall. The floor responded by asking which wall? "The outside wall" I said. That seemed to confuse the floor even more. It wanted to know "which outside wall?" I had to think about that one for a minute. I looked at my children. They seemed as confused by the question as I was. We were all of the understanding that there was but one outside wall in the bathroom. I then thought, perhaps, being a bathroom floor, it considered all 4 walls surrounding it as outside walls. Alrighty then! I merely needed to think like a floor!

We continued our knocking game, me attempting to direct the floor in a certain direction, the floor seeming more and more confused by my human explanations. At one point, not really sure exactly where the knocking was located, I bent down and knocked back at it. The floor and I knocked back and forth at each other for a few minutes, and there were times the floor was sounding rather desperate, but we finally settled upon a satisfactory location.It was at this time that the floor refrained from any communication whatsoever. It no longer talked to us. It stopped knocking at us.

A few minutes later Pa joined us. I showed him the area where the strange knocking was last heard. He seemed to know what it was all about!

Today, Pa is heading into town. He's going to the local hardware store, where he plans to pick up some supplies which he says should put an end to the mysterious communications from our floor! He seems to think the floor needs some breathing space or something, so he's going to make a hole in it, just a few inches from where we last heard the knocking. Then he's going to run a pipe through that hole, and connect it to a couple other pipes that run underneath the floor.

An added bonus is, this area just happens to be quite near where we plan to place my new washer, and the pipes Pa plans to tap into in order to alleviate the floors apparent breathing problem, are the hot and cold water lines. Pa says those lines are just what we need to get my washer up and running.

Hopefully, by tomorrow, both the floor and I will be happily humming along. Perhaps the floor will talk to me again. I hope it's happy with the changes!