Trembling

The world is a much smaller place today than it was when I was young. The earthquake in Chili and the resulting tsunami that is expected reaches several areas where I have friends and my concern for them is quite real.

I have only experienced the earth moving twice in my entire life. Once, when I was eighteen, there was a tremor that made our house tremble briefly. My sister and I were in our bedroom on the second floor and we thought the furnace was exploding. It was a big house and the thought of it moving like that was almost unimaginable to us. Then a few years ago, before I moved to North Carolina, I was awakened in the middle of the night and lay there watching my big heavy bed shaking like something out of “Bedknobs And Broomsticks.” It was a very minor quake compared to this one.

The home I live in now was built just before 1900, but it is made out of concrete and tucked snugly into the side of a mountain. I cannot imagine it moving. In fact, much of my security rests in the strength of the mountain below me.

The Smokeys are ancient mountains, worn almost smooth by eons of wind and weather, but our earth is alive and well. Like all living things she twists and turns, moaning and groaning with growing pains and occasionally erupting in expressions that match her vast size. In the long range of her existence, this is only an inconsequential thing, like a pimple on an adolescent’s face, but for us? We are like tiny parasites whose fragile world’s can be swept away with only a flick of her eyelashes.

Human beings like to think we are capable of controlling everything, but events like this remind me that our connection to the world we call home, is both closer and more tenuous than I might want to believe.