Mother Nature Goin' Crazy

I am in the midwest. We are victim to a whole spectrum of crazy"the world is ending" sort of weather. Tornadoes, ice storms, floods and droughts have become the norm here. Well, this morning at 4:36, my part of middle America was awoken by, yet, another earthly phenomenon- the earthquake.

My husband and I were both born and raised here, so the novelty of our house shaking in the middle of the night, well, freaked us out. He grabbed the kids out of their beds and brought them downstairs (don't know exactly what his plan was with that- we don't know the earthquake protocol). I turned on the TV and went to the internet, searching frantically for proof that our house wasn't being secretly exorcised, but nothing!

(Side note: when we bought our house three years ago, it had cracks in the foundation that concerned us. We had a structural engineer report assure us that the structure was sound and fine, but we've always been haunted by those cracks and have kept that in the back of our mind.)

Since no media had yet confirmed the movement as an earthquake, I ran outside to see if any of the neighbors were out-nope! I reluctantly went to check the foundation. My husband and I both had panic on our faces- it was unspoken, but we both thought the same dreadful fate! We were convinced that our house was sinking into the ground as we live and breathe and we were going down with it! That was a long 23 minutes until, finally, the local FOX affiliate channel came on the air with breaking news- "you're not crazy, yes we did have an earthquake." It only registered 5.2 on the Richter Scale, no real damages to speak of, but it's the talk about town, nonetheless.

My sister called me first thing this morning like she always does. Everyday, we have this odd -hold the phone to our ear and go about our daily business, but discuss not much of anything with real content or meaning - kind of phone relationship. While her kids were screaming in the background, she argues with them about what they would eat for breakfast she asked me what was going on like she would any other day. I found it unusual that she didn't even bring up the night's occurances.

Me: Are you guys dead when you sleep or what?

Her: What? We had an earthquake last night, didn't we?

Me: Well, yah! Why didn't you say anything about it- that was the first thing on my mind!

Her: I just thought I was going crazy.

Me: So you felt it?

Her: Well, I was having one of those crazy dream nights. About an hour earlier I jumped out of bed and ran to the clothes hamper because I thought there was a kid in there. There wasn't. So when I felt the house shaking, I just thought I was going crazy again and went back to bed.