A Real Life Experience
This happened to me on December 11, 1996, at 11:45 at night, when most people are in bed sleeping. As you know, I live alone, next to my sister Ruth who also lives alone. We eat most of our meals together, and this happened to be the day I made supper, so she was here for the evening. When we are together in the evening, we watch television if there is anything on that we want to see, or we listen to audio and\or video tapes, and crochet.
It is time to go home, so she leaves at 10:30, right after the news. It is snowing outside -snowing hard. The weather man has promised us 4-6 inches. We hope he is wrong. Her footprints are quite visible in the snow, as I watch her go home. No sooner has she entered her house when there's a bright flash of lightning and a sharp loud crack of thunder. This is pretty unusual in winter during a snowstorm. I had never heard the expression before, but the weatherman called it "thunder snow".
After she leaves, I get busy at things I like to do, and being a night owl, it gets to be almost midnight when I get ready to retire. I had just turned out the light, and was sitting in my vibrator chair where I usually spend about an hour before going to bed, so I can wind down a little and make plans for the next day. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, something crashed into my window right in back of me. I thought surely my window was broken. It was so loud that I jumped and it really frightened me. A moment later I heard a loud bang on my roof, and a third noise as something rolled off the roof. I had no idea what these noises could be attributed to. If I had been a child, I might have thought it was Santa Claus, landing noisily on the roof, as Christmas was near!
Since I had just read in the paper about all the windows that had been broken the night before by vandals, my first move was to walk all around in the house and look out of all of the windows. I saw no tracks in the fresh snow, so that was ruled out.
After thinking about this for a long time, I finally decided to go to bed, since I could do nothing about it anyway. I was not going out at midnight to check it out! When I did check it out the next day, nothing could be seen as it had snowed all night and all tracks (if there had been any) were covered. Many days passes, and I constantly had this on my mind.
One day, as I mentioned this again to Middy, (my sister), she said that a chunk of ice probably fell off the chimney, with part of it hitting the window and part of it falling onto the roof. Since this made some sense to me, because of the location of the chimney right next to the window, I believed her. This put my mind at ease, and in the following weeks I kept an eye on the top of my chimney in case there would be another ice build-up. It never happened again, but it certainly gave me something to think about.