A. I was in the kitchen, eating ice cream out of the container while searching the internet for someone who would sell me a case of Cricket Cola, to send to a friend who regularly mourns its disappearance.

In the kitchen with me was a small yellow dog belonging to my sister. The dog had just woken up from a nap and, looking for mischief, snatched a sneaker from under my chair and retreated to the far corner of the kitchen to gnaw on it. She looked very pleased with herself. I pretended not to see, hoping that if the attention she clearly desired was not forthcoming she would desist.

This was a silly strategy and after a few minutes I got up and engaged the dog in a game of gimme. We eyed each other from opposite sides of the kitchen island, my sneaker dangling from her grinning mouth. She moves fast and can turn on a dime, but I am bigger and in the end I wrested the shoe away from her.

As I put the shoe out of the dog’s reach, I saw a bookcase on the opposite wall shaking slightly. I watched it for maybe 10 seconds. The workmen next door, I figured, or a low flyover, or maybe a truck drove by and I didn’t notice. I went back to the kitchen and my laptop to see several messages from friends working in Washington and Manhattan saying their buildings were being evacuated due to mysterious shaking. And there on the Times homepage it said: Earthquake strikes entire East Coast; epicenter in Mineral, VA.

Mineral: I’d been through there before, I thought, on a long drive across Virginia, climbing out of the coastal plain and up and over the mountains. The route left I-95 and followed two-lane roads that zipped through little towns with interesting names: Zion Crossroads, Bumpass, Bitterman’s Church, Cuckoo. Mineral is in actuality a very, very small town (pop. roughly 450), but after the towns that precede it – a crossroads with a house on 3 out of 4 corners counts as a town in this part of the world – it makes an impression. There is an abandoned-looking railroad station and a busy Exxon, and all the stores and businesses cluster along the main street. Sagging houses with graceful details – gingerbread trim along the roofline, wraparound porches – line the cross streets, but give way quickly to open fields. Mineral is about an hour from Charlottesville, a decidedly worldly small city, home of the University of Virginia, and an hour and a bit from Richmond, the state capital. It is not, geographically, terribly remote. But it felt silent, forgotten by time, as if it were set much deeper in the countryside than it is. It’s the kind of town country singers write about, the kind of town that dies when the railroad stops coming or the highway is built too far away.

It was gone in the rearview mirror quickly, until it reappeared yesterday. I imagined the rumblings breaking the deep silence of a summer afternoon. CNN visited with Mineral residents and examined broken china and fallen propane tanks. People in Washington and New York went back to work. People in California smirked at all the fuss. People in Mineral, I presume, will glue the china back together, and the town will sink back into quiet.

Q. Where were you during the great Eastern quake of 2011?