I Feel The Earth Move Under My Seat

Yesterday at 1:51 Bill and I were sitting on the back deck.  We’d just had lunch, and we were hanging out, enjoying the gorgeous weather and the peace and quiet (the kids were inside and getting along for the moment).

It was very breezy, and at first that’s what my brain tried to use for an explanation.  The deck was shaking.  So it must be…the wind?  I know.  Square peg in a round hole.  I really wanted it to fit, because there wasn’t any other logical explanation for the feeling of movement.  I wasn’t in a car or a boat or a plane.  My chair wasn’t supposed to be shaking.

Bill, meanwhile, thought I was kicking his chair.  That was the triangular peg his brain had come up with.  But, of course, I wasn’t.  I was just sitting there, kind of frozen, feeling the vibration all around me and wondering what was doing it.

We live near an airport, too, so we’re used to the loudness of the planes taking off, and part of me was thinking maybe this was…oh…somehow caused by a really big airplane…? 

Bill and I looked at each other and just stared while the shaking continued.  Not huge shaking.  But enough to give us both a kind of queasy, dizzy, motion-sickness feeling. 

Yuck.

After the shaking ended – and it probably didn’t last long, but it was hard to tell because it was one of those moments when time stretches in a different direction – we talked cautiously about it, as though hesitant to admit it had happened at all.  Bill was the one who said “earthquake” first.  Later that afternoon when I went on the computer, “earthquake” was confirmed.

The kids, who were playing inside at the time, either didn’t feel it or were just too busy to notice or care.

And that’s it.  My earthquake story.

Do you have one?

Comments

[Lynda Kendrick]

I was sitting at my dining room table, with my laptop, checking out my FaceBook page, when I felt the floor and table tremble. It was very subtle and I wondered if I had REALLY felt the movement or if it was just my imagination. I glanced at the kitchen clock....it was 1:55 p.m.
About that time, my husband, who'd been sleeping (he works nights), came into the room. When I shared with him what I'd felt, he was skeptical, to say the least, so I just dismissed it from my thoughts.
A couple of hours later, just like you, I saw on the internet that an earthquake had occurred at 1:51 p.m. We live about 60 miles south of Atlanta, Ga. Needless to say, "I told you so!!" was heard several times in our household last evening. And that's MY earthquake story.

[Jane M]

Sitting having lunch with my husband when the whole kitchen started to move, especially the floor! I thought at first my husband was shaking his leg out of nerves, but then the rolling was more intense! I looked outside and saw the deck rock and the power lines move. Then I quickly went on my Twitter account where my daughter updates regularly (she works at a big newspaper in D.C.) and she wrote #DCquake and then I knew we had just lived through an earthquake too in New Jersey!