Daddy, my furniture is shaking were the words I awoke to. Half asleep, all I could say was “what?” She repeated herself and the words sunk in. I still didn’t understand what she meant though.
She wouldn’t go back in her room. Definitely afraid of something. She was standing in my doorway, staring down the hallway toward her room. I asked if it were a ghost. No. Not that. Was it a burglar? Could be. She’d heard a noise from the garage directly below her room. Daddy earns his pay.
I went into her room. Giving her dresser a shove I decided it was too heavy to shake. But it had she said again. She’d heard the things on top of it rattling.
The dog wasn’t barking. There was no noise from downstairs. Not a burglar. Maybe she’d been dreaming. Then we heard it. A news flash on the Internet. We had just been through an earthquake. In Georgia?
Not big. 4.1 on the Richter scale. Not deep. Just some rumbling felt for long distances. Atlanta sits on a major quake fault. Inactive for 200 million years, but there. And the New Madrid fault, which is active, isn’t far away. So we get these rumbles once in a while. Always surprising.
Our snowstorms aren’t like Boston blizzards. California quakes beat ours by a mile. But what we have, what we call snowstorms and earthquakes are real to us. And the furniture did shake. That’s part of my story. What’s yours? Www.personalhistorywriter.com
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