Ghost stories

Anne was back in Portugal with hours to spare before our first guest (our son, Nick) was due to arrive.  The guest room was painted with a mattress laid out on the floor for him to use.

Nick has been living in Mexico City and has lived in central America for a couple of years now but his work prospects have been drying up so he will be staying with us for a few months to figure out what to do next.

Both of our daughters had planned to visit us soon after we arrived, so we met them at the airport a couple of days later.  There are plenty of holiday rentals close to where we stay and they were booked into a small farm house, about 8min drive from us in another of these tiny villages in the country.  

 

We wondered how much return business these rentals located in small towns have.  Our hamlet has a couple of holiday rentals that are popular with Swedish visitors who find a community away from home.  I think they enjoy a fair amount of return business.  On the whole for some of these rentals without a community, visitors might be disappointed if they expected to be a stone's throw from a beach and within walking distance of a local coffee shop or a bar.  We will probably make good use of them ourselves in the future for visits from our daughters' families or for friends who need more than the single room we have available in our house.

One grandchild asked if she could have our house when we died which I took as a solid vote of approval. 

 

Our family have a tendency to reach for the supernatural when explaining odd occurrences in the houses that we have lived.  In Grahamstown, our house was reputedly part of an early barracks of the British garrison in the town in the mid-1800s.  The house had the characteristically thick stone walls and yellow-wood floors of early structures in the town.

 

One day our twins, all of 5 or 6 years old ran in from the outside to report that they were afraid of the skeleton in the bath of the out-buildings.

 

Who would give credence to this?

 

I think now, that they might have seen the legs of a large spider protruding from the plug hole and reached the obvious conclusion that it was a tiny skeleton.

 

In America over our twenty years we rented two houses and bought a third.  The boys were afraid to be upstairs alone at our first house.  This is was a direct result of watching a TV show called "America's most haunted" where all the houses looked nothing like the houses in South Africa but uncannily similar to all of the houses in our new neighborhood with their wooden stairs and vinyl sidings.

 

Anne had her share of weird experiences at work in the old nunnery that was the St Peter’s building at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.  A book flew off the shelf of tightly packed books late one night and she felt a hand on her shoulder on a different night walking down a corridor to her office.  She decided it was something not to be alarmed about but the story alarmed everyone else.

 

The house we eventually bought in Essex featured an incident where one of our then very small grandchildren was talking in her crib at bedtime and my daughter asked her who she was talking to and she said "the lady in the corner",  which freaked everyone out!

 

So, inevitably when the family arrived at our house in Portugal there were reports of something supernatural.  A white cat was seen out of the corner of several people’s eyes walking across the floor at various times and inside the house.  To be clear there are stray cats around the neighborhood and two in particular that came looking for attention or adoption (in the street) but we’ve never let them into the house.

 

So I guess our Portuguese house is haunted by a cat.

 

Thank God these visitations don’t follow us around!  I have images of books flying downstairs, a skeleton in the upstairs bath and a little lady appearing in a bedroom with a finger on her mouth to silent us while the new ghost cat rubs its cheek against her semi-transparent legs.

 

Our daughters left after a week of exploring the towns and beaches near us with promises to return soon so I don't think the ghost cat is going to keep anyone away.

 

On the home front I discovered that the hydraulic gate openers were getting false triggers from the infrared sensors when they were closing.  On closer inspection I saw that the sensors had been installed upside down which let the rain in and the circuit was shorting as the gates were closing - which triggered them to open again.  I reoriented them, which was difficult because they were on short electric leads, only to discover a week later that one of the gates had pinched the electric chord repeatedly until the wires inside were exposed which caused a much more serious short that blew the circuit board in the main controller.

 

So now we are using the manual override on each hydraulic arm to swing the gates closed every evening and to open them every morning.

 

I have decided to wait until our container with all our goods from storage arrives before tackling this project again.  I have tools and a volt meter on the way to figure out whether the controller can be repaired.  Its a long shot, but I don’t want to spend more on the gates unless it includes refitting how the arms are bolted into the pillars.  Right now the pillars are gradually being destroyed where the arms are attached to them.

 

We have a couple of chairs out on the front porch now where we warm ourselves in the early morning sunlight with a mug of coffee after breakfast.  I open the gates first thing and we leave them open until the evening.

 

There is a minibus that drives by at about 7:45 and stops at the Portuguese family home a little further down our track. They appear to be taking a group of older people somewhere every day.  The driver has started giving us a small toot on the horn and a wave every morning which is a sweet, welcoming gesture.

 

We have also bought ourselves a pair of bikes and have taken a few rides around the villages near us.  They are e-bikes which have a motorized assist that make riding more or less effortless.  We found them a little intimidating at first, but we got the hang of them fairly quickly.

 

 We met a couple who also have these bikes and they took us on our first fairly long ride to our nearby town.  We wound through back roads, farmland and small clusters of houses through beautiful scenery and smells of orange blossoms.  Our next milestone will be to ride to the beach.

 

Anne has her appointment with the immigration authority to formalize her residence visa early in May and the lawyer helping us with the residency has advised me that it may take too long for us to go the originally intended route where I “reunify” with Anne as her spouse.  The reason is that there are some deadlines for a Portuguese tax benefit that gives us a much reduced tax rate for 10 years that we could miss if I don't start the residency process soon.

 

Since we naturalized as American citizens we are in a tax regime where we have to pay taxes in America on our worldwide income.  There is a treaty that the USA has with Portugal whereby whatever taxes we pay in America are offset against whatever we have to pay in Portugal.  The effective tax rate in Portugal is quite a bit higher than in the USA so a 10 year long break would be a very valuable benefit.

 

So I have an appointment with the Portuguese consulate in Boston in May and I have traveled back to America alone this time.  After all the trips with Anne over the past 18 months it feels very weird to be apart from her.  Anne has to be there when our container with all our belongings arrive from the storage unit - projected to be sometime in the middle of May - so she couldn't join me.

 

A large mural across from the Lynn post office where I went for fingerprints for my FBI background check

It will be an opportunity to see my friends and colleagues one more time before we settle in Portugal.  

 

I am retiring in a few days (April 30) so I'll have plenty of time to work on projects at home in the months ahead.