We're all shook up

I feel the earth move under my feet

I feel the sky tumbling down

I feel my heart start to trembling 

Whenever you're around

- "I feel the earth move"  Carole King, composer

AUBURN - We happened to be standing together in the center of the parlor when we heard a roar and felt the entire house shake beneath our feet.

We stopped talking and stared at each other as the house rattled around us. The rumbling lasted for about 20 seconds.

My wife thought a tractor-trailer rolled across the front yard and just missed our home.

I figured our furnace was on the fritz.

Then I stepped outside to listen for one of the many freight trains that pass through Auburn every evening. 

There was silence. Everything was quiet.

I was no longer puzzled. I concluded that Maine and many parts of New England had just experienced earthquake, and it was a doozy by this region's standards.

My wife watched Facebook light up with people from across that state reporting that they also felt the ground violently shake.

They were not alone. It was a moving experience.

I tried to call my sisters in Massachusetts, but I couldn't get through due to the volume of calls.

This was one of those moments in my life when a phone call does a body good.

When I did reach them, my sisters were as excited as the rest of New England. Both my sisters thought they were going crazy when the quake struck. We ruled that out when we confirmed that a quake had just rocked the area.

Terri scanned Web sites, searching for any morsel of information that a strong quake had just rattled most of New England.

About 30 minutes later, we learned that a 4.0 earthquake shook up everybody across the Pine Tree State. The epicenter was located in Hollis Center, which located 20 miles west of Portland and 100 miles north of Boston.

Anthony and I headed outside with a flashlight to check for structural damage to the house. We did find small cracks in the cinder blocks of the foundation and the asphalt in my driveway developed a couple of small fissures. But a chisel and cement can fix the cracks. I wasn't concerned.

I experienced a smaller earthquake years ago when I was working at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass. I was on the second floor of the newspaper's offices when I notice my editor's computer screen rock back and forth, and he was not sitting behind it.

Over the past, three decades, I have felt the earth rumble underneath my sturdy legs three times, and an earthquake had nothing to do with those moments. My enduring marriage, the birth of my son and the death of my mother were events that rocked my world.

But on Tuesday, October 16, 2012, Mother Nature sent us all a stunning reminder that she has the final say when it comes to all matters of the Earth - and our lives.