Grandma and her haints

What on earth, asked a friend, is a haint.
Genesis of the question was me cautioning him not to rap his knuckles on the wall. Why? came the response. Because my grandmother, born and raised in the hills of southern Missouri, often told me that doing so would “stir up the haints” — or, for the unlearned, ghosts.
Sometimes, she warned, aroused haints took up residence and would answer knocks with ones of their own. I never heard a haint knock, although when young and lying in bed late at night occasionally I’d hear noises that I feared were those of restless spirits come to torment me.
Now, any superfluous knocking I do, unusually on a wooden table near my reading refuge, is to play a joke — a cruel one wife Beverly says — to get our dog Angus to think someone has come to visit. He is in the habit of charging to the door when a stranger arrives and barking furiously — although it is all bark and no bite. Within seconds he approves when visitors pat his head or scratch behind his ears.
Grandma Oliphant didn’t have a lot of superstitions — other than haints — although she had a few concerns she’d pass along. Top of the list was to wear clean underwear without holes when going out. “You never know when something might happen and you’ll end up in the hospital,” she cautioned.
For a small, thin woman who topped 100 pounds only when pregnant with my mother, she was resolute and had the energy and work ethic of a pioneer, which after a fashion she was. She and granddad — a strapping fellow who worked hard all his life — fussed on occasions, but nothing serious, and when she put her foot down he knew it was time to toe the mark.
She followed the old-timers’ rule of when the sun came up it was time to get to work and when it set it was time to be home. She cooked three meals and a pastry of some sort every day.
Seldom was she was idle. Dishes needed washing, the house needed cleaning and her only respite was once we got a television in the mid-50s. Meme, as everyone called her rather than her given name, Ada, fell in love with professional wrestling, of all things.
I can see her now, sitting comfortably in a Victorian child’s rocking chair I still have, ready to rise to answer any need I had. She doted on me too much, but I never minded.