Relaxing in our front room Thursday night after a long day at work, we heard what sounded like something about the size and weight of a brick hitting the end of the house. I looked around the room: three cats, all accounted for, so it wasn’t one of them knocking a book off a shelf or some equally random cat-like mischief. I might’ve gone outside to look around, but the thermometer was pointed stubbornly at zero and the wind was gusting hard enough to shake all the trees outside the window, so no way was I dressing up in all my heavy coats and mittens just to look for some brat throwing rocks at the house.
About ten or fifteen minutes later, though, we both heard it again, this time from the other side of the house. And about twenty minutes later, we heard it again, but from somewhere far away.
That kept going on through the night and into the next morning. And when I described this weirdness to someone at work the next day, she told me she and her husband heard the same thing at their house last night. After work, My Darling B mentioned that several people in her office were talking about it, too.
What I thought it was: The frame of the house sometimes pops when the outside temperatures get very cold and stay there for a couple days. This was a lot louder than the usual popping house frame, but we had just gone from almost a week of below-zero temperatures, followed by nearly a week of above-freezing temperatures, and then on the night of the brick-banging, the temperature plummeted from freezing to zero. My thought was, that had to stress out the wooden frames of the house a lot more than usual.
What it probably really was: Turns out there’s such a thing as an ice quake, when water freezing in the ground makes a banging sound that can be heard for quite some distance. We got a lot of rain during that warm hiatus between the sub-freezing temperatures and it had all day to freeze solid as temps dropped to zero. Then BANG BANG BANG all night long. Wait, that came out wrong. Pretend I didn’t say it that way.
This Is Drivel 