Fragments From Floyd

I had stepped out onto the back porch to bring in the morning's first bundle of firewood. I glanced at the thermometer on the porch rail: in the dark, I couldn't say for certain, but it was darned close to zero. I remember noticing how, while the cold singed my nose when I breathed in the air, it didn't have the bite that yesterday's 30 mph winds gave it. And then it happened. I wish I could tell you what it was.

Ann thought I'd fallen on the porch or had for some reason dropped a forty-pound load of firewood. I thought a tree had hit the roof, although there was no sharp crack of metal or of breaking. Whatever it was it shook the house, and it seemed to me it came from upstairs--as if someone had dropped a hundred-pound bag of horsefeed flat on the wood floor of the second story just overhead. I met Ann rushing out as I rushed in.

"What da heck?" we both said. I checked the roofline all around; the upstairs porch; the front porch roof; and the Very Back Room where things in storage are prone to fall from their haphazard stacks and piles. Nothing. The water still flows. No broken bones show through the siding of the house and its exterior angles all seem plumb. The floors still seem as level as the ever weren't.

We've lived in old houses that creaked and moaned in the cold. If that's what this was, it must have been some deep visceral pain the old house was telling us about. But then, we may never know what things go THUMP in the night.

UPDATE: We were just upstairs, now that it's good and light, looking for an explanation to our morning mystery. Ann called from the 'red room': Fred! Look-- a fox!" We both watched through the window as a large dark-phase red fox loped cross the creek and moved away, down the middle of the snow-covered road to disappear behind the pines. Just then Ann said "There's another one!" and a smaller, very red and svelt fox followed in the tracks of the first. These were the first and second foxes (female, then male?) we've seen here in five years. It's been an interesting morning!