5.8

My niece sent me this photo taken in a grocery store in Louisa after today's earthquake. The epicenter was in the nearby small town of Mineral, about 40 miles northwest of Richmond.

I've heard from friends from as far away as Europe, California and Connecticut this afternoon.

They all wanted to know what the earthquake felt like.

Eerie. Weird. Confusing. Unsettling. Disconcerting.

But not particularly scary.

It happened at 1:51 p.m. I was sitting in the waiting room at the Nissan dealership on West Broad. It was time for my car's annual state inspection (it passed) when the second largest earthquake in Virginia's recorded history began. (The largest was in Blacksburg in 1897.)

At first I thought I was feeling vibrations from a low-flying helicopter. Then the building really started moving. There was no rumbling sound. Nobody panicked. We all stayed right where we were. We didn't speak. We didn't look at each other.

A few seconds passed, maybe 5, before I realized it really was an earthquake. By the time the building had been shaking for about 7 or 8 seconds, I knew it was stronger than any of the minor quakes I had felt before in Virginia.

I looked across the waiting room and past the showroom to the doors leading to Broad Street. Cars were moving along as usual. I looked up to see if the light fixtures were swaying. They weren't. Nothing had fallen from the walls or dropped off the shelves.

Nevertheless, I began to think it might be safer to be outside.

And then it was over.

The earth stopped moving under my chair.

I got up and went outside to look around. Everything seemed normal. When I came back in about 5 minutes later, the TV set in the waiting room had a bulletin from CNN: The sound was too low to hear, but the crawl at the bottom of the screen said an earthquake had struck 90 miles outside of Washington, D.C.

The service man came looking for me to tell me my car was ready. We chatted about the quake. He said cars up on lifts in the service bay had wobbled. All of the service techs had gone outside to wait it out.

I stopped at the grocery store on the way home. Clerks and customers alike all wanted to chat about the quake.

One clerk asked me if I had felt the quake. "Yeah, it was like an E-ticket ride at the State Fair," I told him.

On the drive home, I started to wonder how my cat, Cassie, was doing. When she hears thunder, she hides under the big desk for hours.

Cassie met me at the door looking none the worse for the experience.

"Mrroww?" she said.

In cat speak, that means "feed me."