And, he also read another chapter the night before a previous earthquake. I thought, while I like this book, enough is enough.
We knew this wasn’t the big one, but it was big enough. We got up and assessed the damage. Ryder was at the base of the stairs, shaking. She either fell down or found herself unable to move.
My books and whatnot were on the floor, piled three deep. Downstairs, the medicinals had fallen into the sink. The freezer door popped open and the partial contents were on the floor. Spice jars flew off the rack, there was glass everywhere. The paintings and other art in the living room was askew; one painting, above the far door, was on the floor.
I put on coat, hat, boots, and went outside. The wood in the outer stack on the right hand side of the woodshed was tipped but had not fallen. The outside world was pretty much the same. The goats were on the hill behind their shed, wide eyed. The chickens (in their roost) were fairly calm. The horses were wanting their morning feed. Tyra, the drama queen, she was wide eyed. Some books came off the shelves in my cabin, but not many.
I came back inside after tending to the horses and went back upstairs. It was then that the full magnitude of what had happened here hit me. My intellectual hub was (to put it mildly) a mess. I had to begin the clean up effort by putting things away that were on the edges. It was a full morning’s work. Meanwhile, Pete was happily listening to people calling in to KFQD telling of what they’d noted. The International Cemetery was okay, and the Pot Shop on Tudor Road was open. Schools were closed. Some roads were wiped out.
As I cleaned up, I realized that my world is fairly insular and that my intellectual hub is my epicenter. I commute to and from it every day, several times a day in fact. Now I’m concerned that perhaps we’ll have another quake and that everything will go flying again. Then it will be déjà vu all over again.
Quakes lend themselves to post traumatic stress disorder. I have post traumatic intellectual hub disorder. Enough is enough. I am just going to have to cut the tape.
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