I lived in California for a greater part of my life. You'd think I would have gotten used to them after the first several hundred. Most of them I experienced were rather small in nature, with little or no damage to the areas they hit.

The first big one I was witness to happened in the early hours of the morning sometime in the early 70's. I slept in a big four post, spool bed. I remember the bed shaking, and thinking that my dad was trying to wake me up. The shaking turned out to be an earthquake, and a fairly sizable one at that. I did hear my dad's voice, but it was him telling me not to get out of bed.

It was still dark and I had a goldfish bowl on my dresser. He felt some water on the floor and was afraid the bowl and gotten knocked off the dresser and that there was broken glass on the floor. He didn't want me to cut my feet. I remember him carrying me out into the living room, whispering soothing words of comfort to my still foggy brain. I'd never been in an earthquake before, so I was a bit scared to say the least.

When we all got into the living room, we noticed that the front doors were wide open. It was one of those deals where the one side was always closed, and the other one you used to come in and out of the house. It was at that time we realized the dog was missing.

His name was Samson and he was a Peakapoo. Just a little mop of a dog, but he played an important role in our family. Being as young as I was, I was more distraught over the fact that he was missing, than I was at all the damage it had done to our house, or, more importantly, the surrounding community.

We lived in Southern California at the time, and our house butted up to the desert. We had a lot of trails to explore as well as the hills behind our house. The man across the street had said he saw Samson high tail it out the front door and up into the hills. We searched high and low for him, but to no avail. He was nowhere to be found. We were all heartbroken. The neighbor next door had lost his dog as well.

Samson slept by the couch in the family room, on the left hand side as you were facing it. There was a rather large picture hanging over the couch. It had fallen down during the earthquake. The way my parents figure it, once that picture hit the floor, the dog bolted. It was just bad timing that had the doors fling open as he was making a break for it.

I was pretty sure that we'd never see him again. My folks tried to be positive, but that's a pretty hard thing to do in the face of everything that had happened.

A couple of days later, a bunch of us were all standing around talking. I really think that this is when I got my first introduction into miracles. All of a sudden, one of the men said "Well, would you look at that?" When we turned our heads to gaze over at the hill he was pointing at, Samson and Thor (the neighbors German Shepherd) were trotting along, side by side. Seems they went to higher grounds until it was safe to come back.

How cool is that?

Comments

Posted by: Lori at March 5, 2005 11:14 AM