the Earthquake

I was not quite ten weeks pregnant when the 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of the Tohoku region of Japan. Although Geordie and I made it through without any injuries or damage, it changed our lives. For today's Nanowrimo writing session, I spent a good chunk of it writing down my memory of that day. Here's an excerpt about the exact moment the earthquake hit, just those first few minutes as it happened and before I knew the full extent of the damage.


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March 11.

A Friday. A good day, then, because Geordie would be coming home. He’d meet me as I was finishing work, and we’d probably have dinner together in Loc City. Ramen, maybe. Then home to relax a bit together and to talk about the week. Those were all the plans we had made.

My shift started at five, though I usually went in early, around four. I did my hair in the morning but would not bother with getting fully dressed until three or so. A little after one, I sat down to the computer to write an email to my brother. I had been putting it off, as I often do; I am not the best of penpals. As I wrote, the apartment began to shake – another earthquake, a minor occurrence in Japan, for the most part. It gave me something to share with Ryan, and I added a sentence about it to his email.

The ‘quake started small. It felt like any other ordinary earthquake, one of dozens I’d felt since I arrived in Japan. After the few seconds of shaking, you go back to your usual business, as though nothing had really happened. One had woken me from my sleep on Wednesday morning, a little stronger than usual but nothing to get worked up about.

But the shaking did not stop. Instead, it intensified. That made me pause.

“Don’t panic,” I said aloud to myself. It would die down in a moment; it always did. I had never before been in an earthquake that had actually scared me.

Then a can of soup fell off the shelf above the kitchen sink, and I knew that this was not an ordinary earthquake, that it was something big, that I could not just sit there and wait for it to stop. Other things began to fall, including one of my rose pictures in the hall. I leaned over my computer and took down my diploma so it wouldn’t fall on the monitor.

I stood and pulled open the curtains of the sliding glass door at the front of the apartment. Across the narrow street was an empty house, and a couple hours earlier, two men had shown up to do some work on the interior. They ran out into the street as the shaking continued, holding their arms out to balance themselves. They spoke to each other. Often, I could hear when people on the street spoke, but because of the noise of the earthquake, I couldn’t hear the workmen. Some earthquakes are quiet, but with some come a rumbling, a deep and earthy sound like terrestrial thunder. This earthquake brought that sound.

Everything in the apartment moved, rattling about, a surprisingly tremendous noise. I suddenly did not what to stay in the apartment any longer.

I had on only a t-shirt and a pair of around-the-house boxer shorts. Grabbing the closest pair of pants to me, I pulled them on and put my cell phone and wallet into the pockets. I went into the hall and pulled on my heavy winter coat, leaning against the wall for support. Without bothering with socks, I slipped into my shoes and reached for the front door. My hands shook as I laid them on the door handle, and I thought that it was not just because of the earthquake’s shaking and the cold. After at least one minute, the ‘quake still had not abated. It felt like it would never end.

I can’t say how long exactly the earthquake lasted – somewhere between two and three minutes perhaps – but it felt like an eternity as I stood on the street and watched the houses shake on their foundations. The street moved – back and forth – and the electric lines overhead swayed and jumped, pulled taut before sagging and then going taut again. No tall buildings were in the area, so I didn’t worry about anything falling on me, but those wires made me uneasy. It was hard to stand up straight; I rocked from side to side as though I were on a boat.

Most of the buildings on my street were residences, but because it was the middle of a week day, not many people were at home. Only a few came out into the street, and all of them save for the workmen and myself were elderly. They clung to fences or carport supports and said very little. A crash came from the home across from my apartment, and one of the workmen ran back inside.

After a time, just as it felt like the earthquake would never end, the earth began to calm, and the shaking died away. It did not stop altogether, not immediately, but the buildings ceased their swaying, and it was possible to walk easily again. I stood in the street, pulling my coat around me, shivering with cold and fear. I did not know what to do.

My direct neighbor in the apartment home came outside and into the street, looking around amazed but unshaken. She said to me in Japanese, “Are you alright?”

“Yes, I’m okay,” I said. “Are you?”

“I’m alright.” She nodded her head and added, “That was very big, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Very big,” she repeated. “Probably a 5.”

It did not occur to me until later, after I knew the full magnitude of the earthquake, that I realized she meant that by the Japanese scale, which tops out at 7.

She waved at one of our neighbors down the street and called to them, leaving me alone. My thoughts flew to Geordie; I didn’t know where the earthquake had originated, but I was sure he had felt it to some degree. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed his number. All lines were busy, as I had guessed they would be. That didn’t stop me from trying again.

I went back into the apartment to survey the damage. Only one plate in the sink had broken, probably from the soup can that had dropped on it. Books and other odds-and-ends had fallen off the coffee table and my tall bookshelf, but nothing had broken. My desk had been pulled away from the wall. The wall on the left side of the window over the couch had cracks at the window’s edges. Everything was in disarray, but that seemed to be the extent of the damage. The power was off.

The aftershocks came steadily, some of them stronger than other earthquakes I had felt in the previous two years. The sliding doors that separated the two rooms rattled constantly, and I knew I could not stay there. I decided to dress properly and go to work. I could think of nothing else to do.

a bit of a hiatus

I'm proud of myself for sticking to my goal of posting every day. I've worked through a lot of the things that have been on my mind this month, and it's felt good to get my thoughts written down. It's helped. I'm still a long way from "feeling better," but it has helped me come to accept what has happened. Most importantly, I've been able to share Lauren and her story with so many people, and that's wonderful. It's the best thing that I could do - for myself and for her.

November is almost here, and soon, I'll be working on that 50,000 word goal. To make things a little easier for myself, I'm going to cut back on my blog posting. I'm aiming for 2-3 posts a week. I don't know if what I write for Nanowrimo will ever end up on this blog. For one thing, I'm taking a creative non-fiction approach and thus it will be more story-like than loosely-organized-journal-entry-like. I won't be editing it until after November (and considering how busy I'll be in December, I probably won't get around to editing before the new year), and I certainly don't want to publicly display any of it until I've edited it. So, the blog is going to have to take a backseat to the 1667 words I need to get out each day in November. I don't know when (or if) I'll start posting daily again. As I said, I'll be busy in December, and there might be some periods of time when internet access isn't even a concern for me. But I'll still be writing about Lauren, and I'll still be trying to post some of it.

Also, a brief hiatus will be starting as of the end of this post. Today, we're flying back to Florida, and I'm going to take a few days to recover from jetlag and see some of my family for the first time in almost two years. Also, I'm going to be meeting my in-laws, which I'm very excited about. I want to spend a couple days just grounding myself within my very loving family and sharing Lauren personally with them. I intend to be posting regularly again by next Friday. I don't want to leave this blog in the dark for too long.

So, have a good weekend, all! I'll be back again in no time.

Japan: a picture gallery (I)

I had another busy day today and didn't get much writing done. So, what I'm going to give you in this post are some of my favorite pictures from my life here in Japan. This week has been hard as Geordie and I say goodbye to this beautiful country we've come to love so much.

These are just the first ten of twenty pictures I want to post. I encourage you to click on the pictures to see larger versions - some of them are much better when they're bigger! Look for more in the next posting.


Let's start this off right: Mt. Fuji from Gotemba, March 2009.



A lion guardian at a shrine in Takayama, January 2009.



Weeping willow tree in Takayama, January 2009.



Sakura over a shrine in Utsunomiya, April 2009.

A huge statue of Kannon-sama in Takasaki, April 2009.

Wisteria at Matsumoto Castle, May 2009.

With Benni-sensei in Maebashi, during an autumn festival, October 2009.

Behind us is an omikoshi - a portable shrine - which is carried around
the town, presumably to show the god its domain (or to show the people
their local god). Benni-sensei and I were among the group of
shrine-carriers, and we were also honored by being asked to carry
for a short time the lanterns that led the way in front of the omikoshi.

Easily one of my best expriences in Japan.

Maple trees at Mt. Tsukuba, November 2009.

Tsurgua Castle in Aizu-Wakamatsu, New Year's Day 2010.

Meoto Iwa, the wedded rocks, in Ise, January 2010.

him and me and her

I lived alone for several years, and I lived far from my family for a number of those years. While in Florida, I had my cat Sarge to keep me company, but most of my time in Japan was as a solitaire. After my last roommate and I parted ways, I decided that the only way I would ever live with anybody again was to be married to them.

Marriage was never something I completely ruled out of my life. I didn't want to not get married. I didn't want marry just any man; I wanted to marry the right man. I also would have been okay with cohabitation, but I had the feeling that marriage would make things easier from a legal standpoint, not to mention just for the sake of convenience. But that was really a distraction from the main point, which was that I wanted to be in love with someone before I considered living with them.

Geordie moved in with me at the beginning of February, 2011. Though, really, "moved in" is just a convenient way to put it. It was possible that it was going to be a temporary thing, a place for him to live while he looked for a permanent job and while I looked for a new one. He was temporarily assigned a position in Hitachi, which was far enough away from Moriya for him to be unable to make a daily commute. So, really, he lived with me on the weekends. The rest of the week, I was still alone. We'd seen more of each other when we weren't living together.

Two weeks after he moved in, we found out I was pregnant. We saw no way for him to be able to leave the job he had, so for a month, he was home only on the weekends. I was pregnant alone, and it was tough going. It felt to me that I was becoming more adjusted to the pregnancy than he was, and to be fair, that was probably true. I lived with the pregnancy constantly; for him, it was a weekend thing. He didn't go through the many bodily changes that reminded me of what was happening or the mood swings that shook me into sudden bouts of crying. Or the tiredness - that sheer exhaustion that knocked me out cold. These were oddities to him, things I had to explain again every weekend. That ended with the Tohoku earthquake, the story of which is far too long to tell here and shall be written about at length in November.

Things changed after the earthquake. Geordie came back from Hitachi, and his company sent him to work in Tokyo, which was an unpleasant commute but one that allowed him to come home every day. From then on, I had him every day and every night. We became a daily occurence for each other, and it was during this time, I think, that the pregnancy became a very real thing for him. It was at that point that we became not a unit of two but a unit of three.

It happened faster than I had expected. One month, I was living alone happily enough; the next, I was living with a family - my family. I had thought that would take longer to adjust to, but by the time we moved to Susono, it was done. I was a wife and a mother, carrying a child that would make our little family complete. I was carrying our child, and nothing could have been more right. Everything was as it should be, and I would not have gone back to living alone for anything. I still wouldn't.

Geordie and Lauren and me. We're a family. We always will be. Lauren is a part of us, still loved and cared for. It doesn't matter that she's not physically here with us; she's here in other ways, and we'll carry her with us for the rest of our lives.

3rd Japanniversary

Oddly enough, last week - besides being the week I expected to have my daughter home with me and in my arms - also marks the end of my third year in Japan.

I am not the same person I was when I came to Japan three years ago. Even if things had gone as planned this year, I would still be a much different person. I embraced my role as a teacher and truly enjoyed my job for the first time. I furthered my horizons as a wide-eyed observer, taking in everything Japan had to offer and seeking more, always more. I had no expectations; I wanted only to experience and to enjoy. And I did, more so than I could ever have imagined.

I did not expect to fall in love. I did not expect to fall pregnant or get married. I did not expect to become a mother. These were not things that could be planned, and they were certainly not things I would have made plans for anyway. But if I were to go back and start anew, I would not give them up. I would not change them, even knowing how these three years in Japan would end. I would give anything to have Lauren alive and with me, but I would not want to give her up at all. Better to have her memory and the profound impact she has had on my life than to not have her at all. It is she who has changed me most, who made me a mother and, at the same time, deepened my love for Geordie as we walked the path toward parenthood together.

Though Geordie and I both continue to love Japan, neither of us feel that we can stay on after what has happened. We can't stay in Susono, and Geordie can't remain at his job here. It has been hard enough just being in this apartment and sensing how unchanged it is, how normal. We can't continue where we left off, waiting for Lauren to make her arrival and dreaming our hopes for the future. We need to be grounded and start again, rebuilding our lives and recovering from Lauren's sudden absence.

It's not the way I want to leave Japan. I had never given much thought to how I would leave Japan, but this isn't the way I want it to go. With Lauren, I thought we would be going when she was a couple years old, returning to the States to be closer to family, so that friends and relatives could be active in her life. I thought we would be going as a family, not with empty arms.

I still love Japan - I will always love Japan. One day, I think Geordie and I will end up back here; it is our hope that will happen. But for now, Japan is not for us. For myself, it is a time to look inward, to process all that has happened to me in the past three years and to ready myself for what is to come in the future. Japan gave me so many wonderful things, not the least of which being my husband and daughter. It also gave me confidence in myself and my abilities, it brought me job fulfillment and satisfaction, it showed me wonders and beauty that I could only have imagined, it introduced me to people who affected me deeply. It taught me much about myself and prepared me to welcome Geordie and Lauren into my life. Three years ago, Japan was exactly what I needed, and I will remember it as a place of magic and love. It is my treasure, and for a while, it was my home.

I hope that it might someday be my home again.

blog changes

Every three years or so, I change blogs. I've used Livejournal, MySpace, and now Blogger. I might be changing again soon.

All I've done so far is give this blog a facelift. I'll probably keep tweaking it over the next couple of days/weeks before deciding how I like it or if I'm going to move it or if I'll just start fresh elsewhere. No worries, because I'll keep this space updated with whateve decisions I end up making. Everything should be settled by the beginning of November, because I want to be ready to go for National Novel Writing Month. This blog (or whatever blog) will play a big part of my writing experience next month, so I want it to be all shiny and ready for that 50,000 word goal.

Rewind: A Child Called Lucky

So . . . in the year or so since I last posted a blog, lots of things have changed. I mean, LOTS of things. And all of these changes can be expressed in one word: Lucky. What is Lucky? Easy enough to answer. This is Lucky:

That, friends, is a baby. To be perfectly accurate, it's my baby.

Yeah, I know. I can hardly believe it either. But there Lucky is and there Lucky will stay. Until October, at which point Lucky will be born and the changes will become even more drastic.

You may be wondering . . . "Lucky?" You'd have to ask G about that. G used this name to refer to our growing bundle of cells early on, and it's stuck. More on that later. While Facebook knows this little one as "the Keefeling," G and I refer to him/her as Lucky, so that's what I'm using here. Don't worry, not all of the forthcoming posts are going to revolve around Lucky, but because this is my life right now, you can expect to hear a lot about what we're expecting. Consider it an added bonus that there's a little insight into Japan's take on the miracle of childbirth.

I let myself get into some bad habits in 2010. One was a lull in studying Japanese. Another was not blogging regularly. Or at all. Now that I've got time and energy (hello, second trimester!), I'm trying to remedy that. Not just because it's good for me and people seem to want to hear what I have to say - still trying to figure that one out. But also because I have Lucky to write about . . . and for. A lot of this is for Lucky, for a time when Lucky might actually care about what was going on while I carried him/her around. And because Lucky is going to be the one and only, I feel I should write all this stuff down. It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me, and I'd like to be able to save it.


Note: This post is pre-dated. I wrote it several months after the date it says here. I did that because that's when I found out about Lucky, and that's when this whole "big changes" thing really started. I've got some unposted writings that I want to share, but because I'm anal about this kind of thing, I'd like to do it in chronological order. So keep in mind that not all new posts will appear at the top of the blog. Part of the reason I've delayed these writings so long is that I've only recently really been able to come to terms with the fact that I am going to be a mother in a very short amount of time. That took a lot of getting used to. I still don't think I'm used to it. I'm hoping this helps some.

rewind: my motel room

So, you want to see pix of my apartment? Well, too bad! (Seriously, I'm working on getting videos, but it's taking longer than I anticipated, for reasons I don't want to get into right now). Instead, you get to witness the marvelousness of my motel room, in which I dwelled for six nights. Actually, I slept remarkably well in this tiny little room, and I spent hours in it without going insane. I'm not sure what that suggests about my psyche.


I am standing next to the bathroom door and directly in front of the room door. That's how small the room was. Enough room for bed, desk, chair, and TV. Japanese TV is hilarious, by the way (except for the news, which is boring in any language). There are more shows of people sitting in panels and making guesses about things than I could count. I watched anime, cooking shows, travel shows, generally anything that caught my eye and was more than just people sitting around and talking.


The bed, which was just big enough for me, though the blanket was a little short. Very low, but very comfortable, more so than my apartment bed because the motel bed has a thicker mattress and sits on something soft. The pillow was a little weird, and I'm glad Genna told me about them beforehand. It wasn't filled with anything soft; instead it was filled with pellets (I think she said they were wheat germ? One of my students said that "macaroni" is also used sometimes). Seriously, you could single out the pellets and roll them between your fingers. Everytime I moved, it made weird crunchy noises. And yet, it was surprisingly comfortable. Although the pellets themselves were a little hard, they made a nice cushion. My real complaint was that it was too damn small.

The toilet, which was quite majestic in its own way. The bathtub/shower is to the left, and it was very small. The important thing here is the toilet, which has buttons. None of which I pressed, because I know how a bidet works, and I preferred not to get sopping wet. But the toilet does all kinds of wondrous things, and its pressure is magnificent. I LOVE Japanese toilets. I have yet to break any. Americans could learn a lot by studying Japanese toilet technology. My apartment toilet isn't as fancy or space-agey, but I like it just the same. It has something the motel toilet doesn't: a faucet on the top where clean water comes out so you can rinse your hands off. That is totally nifty.

And here's a view of the motel itself. First Inn is strictly a business motel, which explains why it's a little spartan in its functionality. It has both Japanese and Western style rooms, and the staff - speaking no English at all - was very helpful and considerate. I basically live right across the street from it and see it every day.

And, as you can see in the background, MOUNTAINS! I can't walk anywhere in this town without seeing mountains, the novelty of which still hasn't worn off for me.

Okay, so that was the motel. I hope to get an apartment post up by the end of the weekend, but I make no promises!

rewind: I sing the praises of Vancouver.

I. A haiku about Vancouver.

Ahem. Cue beat music.

Vancouver, mountains,beautiful; snow-white, snow-cold,but go there you should.

Thank you.

II. Genna's camera captures Vancouver.

(proof that we were in Vancouver! ladies, hope it's alright that I'm posting this!)

III. Food I ate in Vancouver.

Ah, Canada, the land of candy that Americans have never heard of and could only dream about. Behold the glory that is the Crunchie bar. Witness the wonders of the hazelnut filling. Puzzle at the complexity of icewine chocolates. Melt in the divinity of maple sugar candy. Wonder at the joy of Turkish Delight wrapped in chocolate.

Translation: I consumed mass quantities of candy while in Vancouver. I probably ate my weight in Crunchie bars, because sponge toffee is the best invention in the history of the world. And, yes, there was actual Turkish Delight, which I now love more than ever. I don't think I was too far off from it when I tried my hand at it, I just think I got the timing wrong with the cooking. Oh, well, I'll try it again someday. Maybe I'll even get to Turkey some day and have some of the real McCoy!

Had also some unappetizing Chinese food (sorry, Sarah, maybe I should have had the chicken BALLS!), a Subway sandwich, a delectable BLT, delicious lobster rolls, french fries with mayonnaise (a Canadian favorite), and a gyro. Or two. But it had nothing to do with the falafel guy. Nothing at all. Really.

IV. In transit to Japan.

The Vancouver airport is the nicest airport I've been to. It has dioramas inside it. It's like taking a trip to a freaking museum. It is the awesome. In fact, Vancouver is TEH AWESOME. Srsly.