Maria Donovan

This month’s entry for Bushboy’s Last on the card challenge contains a mystery.

Every month I get a little surprise because I’ve forgotten what my last photo might be. This one was taken as evidence of something strange.

On waking up one morning and going into the hallway, I found the floor ahead of me covered in spots of dried-up moisture, as if it had been raining indoors; there were even drops of water beading in a few places where it hadn’t had a chance to dry. You can see it best where the light comes in.

How could this happen? It took a while to figure it out beginning with:

Oh no! The roof is leaking. The entire attic area must be swamped! But there was no moisture on the ceiling. The drips didn’t come from there.

Looking around, I could see it wasn’t just in the hallway but also in the kitchen and bathroom and part of the living room – all nearby. Luckily, not in the bedrooms at the other end of the hallway.

Second thought: had there been so much condensation in the air from cooking and showering the evening before that it had somehow ‘rained’ on the floor in the night? But there was very little moisture inside the windows. And this phenomenon was unknown to me. What was different?

We hadn’t needed to light the woodburner the night before – and we rely on that to suck some of the moisture from the air. But that also meant it wasn’t cold enough for condensation. So…what caused this seemingly spontaneous event?

There had to be a reason. Can you guess what it might be?

A further clue: I’d noticed a certain crunchiness underfoot the evening before but I’d already cleaned the floors once and didn’t feel like doing it again.

At last my husband remembered that he had dropped salt and it had scattered everywhere.

We must have picked it up on our slippers and moved it around, leaving grains of salt all over the floor. Not into the bedrooms because we take our slippers off in the hallway (I was glad about this!) – I can only conclude that the moisture in the air had been sucked up by the salt, leaving this scattering of what looked like raindrops.

I was so relieved we didn’t need a new roof that I was happy to stick with this explanation and get the kettle on!

Brian’s Last on the Card challenge is simple and fun. Post your last photo for April and link to Bushboy’s post, where you can also see his photos and read the rules: no editing and no need to explain (unless you can’t resist!); use the tags The Last Photo and #LastOnTheCard.

Did you guess the answer to the mystery? Any strange things going on in your house? The house detective is here to help.