Earthquakes on my mind

Having family in New Zealand, albeit not in the vicinity of Christchurch, earthquakes have been much on my mind. It's an unstable country, where small quakes are so frequent the locals hardly notice them. Thus it was for me, growing up in Johannesburg when the gold mining made tremors from underground rock falls just part of life.

But it's a deeply unsettling feeling when the earth moves under your feet. We so much take its stability and support for granted. I can only imagine a little of what it's like to experience an earthquake on the magnitude and scale of the recent one in Christchurch and last year's devastation in Haiti.

We had a small taste in Cape Town. Must have been in the early 70's. My husband's brother was in town, and the three of us went out to dinner at the Mount Nelson Hotel. We were not in the grand dining room but down in more intimate atmosphere of the basement night club. Suddenly, the Californians at a neighbouring table got up and raced outside. It took us a while to realize what was going on and I think it only really dawned when the band's music trickled to a stop.

At home, luckily, the children didn't wake, but our dear maid Sarah who was baby-sitting had had quite a fright.

The epicentre had been in a small Boland town called Tulbagh. We did experience an after-shock, but it so happened my husband and I were driving in the car. That kind of cushions the shock.

A couple of weeks later, I took the three children up to Johannesburg by train to visit their grandparents. Our eldest told my mother, "We saw the broken houses."
She asked, "From the earthquake?"
Dear daughter answered, "No, from the train!."