Like many others (whom I’m grateful for) one of our friends out east texted to ask if we’re ok
Help!, I replied, “We fell into a hole in the earth and can’t get out!”
I should have known not to be cavalier about it. Sometimes humor is all you got.
Lately, even the sky appears uncommitted to the season. Opaque, gray, foreboding, rendering rain and sleet instead of its usual cheer of fluffy white snow. On top of that everywhere you go it seems people are a little off. Like the ground, the collective mood in the community has shifted, from its normal festive optimism to a guarded wariness. Only the folks jingling bells by the red kettle appear unmoved, unshaken as it were. Yet you know they must be. We all are. Every time there’s an aftershock people freeze. Nevermind the statistical unlikeliness of another Whopper occuring, this is the reality we’re all living with lately
Anymore, all it takes is the washing machine upstairs to go out of balance to move me to the edge of my chair. The whole floor shakes until it rights itself. I’ve felt it a hundred times or more the past nine years. It’s big sheets or rugs in the spin cycle. I know what it is. But lately? Or I come back to bed after a pee in the middle of the night and HW wakes, her hand darts out to touch me, “Was that you?!” Even the phantoms are more scary at night. And there are plenty of those, the false positives, they’re almost as bad as the real ones. It’s like we’ve all been reduced to human seismometers now, and fidgety ones at that.
Wait… what’s that. Just now, another one? I think so.
Or was it?