Literal Comfort--Ignore the idiom.

When we were really little, a few houses before we moved to Valley Falls, my mother would leave us in the house while she did chores. One of those chores was milking and caring for a cow. In their early married years, my parents lived on a dairy farm, one of the most upscale and well cared for in the area. My mother, always an animal lover, would go to the barns to watch the milking. Before milking machines, cows were milked by hand into open buckets. Those buckets were a magnet for flies, and even at that well-tended dairy farm, one of the steps in processing the milk was to strain it to separate out the flies. My mother was appalled at the thought of feeding her babies fly-strained milk, and so had bought a family cow, over which she had more environmental control: she could shoo the flies away before they fell into the pail. Hand milking, and I suppose shooing flies, took a long time, and so we kids were in the house by ourselves and left alone. Well, not really alone, because our Uncle Joe lived with us in an upstairs room. By then, he had lost his wife to cancer, his only child to drowning and his left arm to an accident at the Powder Mills. Thinking back, it's no wonder that he, forced to live with his younger brother's family, had pretty much withdrawn from family life, and lived as independently as possible. He was always very kind to us kids though, and seemed to welcome our company when we followed him around outside. So when Ma was gone for what seemed an eternity, and when the house seemed empty and lonely with only my brother and sister, I would call up into the grate in the ceiling, "Joe, are you up there?" "Yes," he would answer, as he would walk around his room. "Can't you hear me--I'm walking the floor over you." Those were the words to a popular song at the time, which carried quite a different meaning, but I was reassured to hear his voice , and his footsteps overhead.