awakened this morning by what I mistook for a ghost

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Originally uploaded by an0nym0usmuse

It sounded like the distinct rustling of bedclothes; maybe Donald Fagen's "bright nightgown." Others, I learned later, had heard a sound like a train roaring, or da boom of a passing sound system. I just heard a sharp rustle. Waking up, the room was still. Nothing had moved. I saw nothing. I half expected to see something.

For most of my life until adulthood, I was terrified of the dark. I never knew what infantile experience triggered this fear, unless it was the visit by my uncle in my room a day or so after his death in a car wreck, when I was three years old. I overcame my fear by hiking the woods around my house in the dead of night when I reached adolescence. So now, I suppose, if a ghost were to appear, I'd be in a better frame of mind.

But it wasn't a ghost; wasn't anything that I could see. Couldn't get back to sleep, though. It was 4:30, an hour before I was supposed to wake up, and it's an hour I lost.

Of course, as my news-savvy readers have probably figured out, my "ghost" was the Illinois earthquake, which I think was kinda neat. I'm not completely civilized; I still live "in" nature, so the experience wasn't an intrusion. Just wished it had happened an hour later.

I actually delight in things like earthquakes, storms, tornadoes. Civilization sees such events as "bad," but I see it as a natural balance reasserting itself. And in my life, actions, and choices, I prefer to cast my lot with nature.