Earthquake!

It may not be as disastorous and condeming as it sounds, but this morning, at six o'clock sharp, I experienced an earthquake. I was lying in my bed drifting from partial wakefullness to the solitude of sleep and was nudged awake by what my brain percieved as a washing machine rumbling from somewhere closeby in the building. I soon came to realize that washing machines in Kyrgyzstan were few and far between and did not take part in such activity. Immidiately afterwards realizing that it was not a washing machine but something else, my brain, runninmg on autopilot as groggy brains do, snapped to far away from Central Asia to my families' house on (or very near to) the beach in Nags Head, North Carolina.

Our humble beach house, like so many others in that part of the world, is set on long stilts much like a stork. (You see, houses near to the beach have to protect their vital organs from the assault from oncoming seawater.) Periodically when I was sleeping in Nags Head, just as I was today in Kyrgyzstan, I would be roused by the washing machine's steady churning on the other end of the house. The wasing machine made the house, because it was floating on the warm beach breeze and not firmly planted on terra firma, participate in a gentle but abrupt rocking motion, very similar to the one I felt today. Some of those devoutly devoted to my Kyrgyzstan "adventures" may remember that I experienced an earthquake similar in feeling to the one I experienced today. Then I was living in Darkan and consumed by a volunteers duties. Today I was in my aparptment in Bishkek.

My aparptment is on the fourth floor of a five floor building so the lateral movement of the building may have added to the intensity of the earthquake I felt. I don't know. Perhaps my sister could answer that question! She is, after all, consumed by geologic studies at the moment. But I do know this: that the earthquake I felt today was smaller than the last one I experienced. It only lasted five to ten seconds; much more abbreviated than the last one. It was interesting however: the groans of the building brought to mind a subtle fear that something much bigger, on a much more massive scale was going on. Somewhere perhaps five hundred, perhaps a thousand, perhaps ten thousand miles away far far beneath my lounging body the earth was breathing a subtle sigh of relief.