We were only gone overnight – just a short visit to La Petite. We came home to find this.

I’m a public school teacher, so my first instinct was to look for evidence of vandalism. Rocks? Any windows broken? Nope, nothing. This online gig, with my students scattered all over the state, keeps me safer than teaching in the neighborhood school, if nothing else.

I sent a picture to La Petite. She suggested a poltergeist holding a Fourth of July party while we were gone.

We asked our neighbor about weather. Any hail? High winds? Nope. However, the neighbor had been working on the far side of his house during the hottest part of the day when he heard an explosion. He circled his house and found nothing – nothing, that is, except more neighbors asking, “What the heck was that?”

To jump straight to the conclusion, the glass tabletop had expanded one time too many. It withstood many winters and summers, cold and hot and in between, and it just couldn’t take one more overheated day.

A friend confirmed the possibility. She’d worked for a glass company for many years and she actually had the same experience with an “exploding” tempered glass tabletop. Like us, she expects to find stray shards of glass under her deck for a long, long time.

Frankly, I almost prefer the poltergeist theory. Peeves, what it you?