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We’re storytellers, Southerners are.

No surprise, then, that we’re already mythologizing Earth’s strange and sudden shift on Tuesday afternoon.

Well, what’d you expect? This ain’t California, where a 5.8 quake is nothing but a quiver.

So no sooner had the ground stopped shaking when we started telling our tales.

Like this one:

Rodney Trask knew something was up when the Volkswagen Beetle he was inside  started to shake.

He’s an automotive technician at Der Wagen Haus on Spring Garden Street in Greensboro. He figured it was something with the car. 

He closed the door, looked at the next bay and saw a Volkswagen Passat shaking.

Then he listened. Everything in the shop was rattling — even the cables on the lift. 

“The hair was standing up on my arms,’’ he related a couple of hours later.

Locally, there were no reports of damage. But the earthquake did cause some of the most exciting Facebook and Twitter feeds of the decade:

• “Wow! Sitting at Bur-Mil park working away and the whole building started to shake! Earthquakes in Greensboro? Weird!”
• “Rattled my kitchen plates in my cabinets thought they were falling off the wall in Summerfield.”
• “OK... SO I WAS THINKING I WAS GOING CRAZY. MY HOUSE WAS SHAKING. I CALLED 911 AND THEY SAID REPORTS ALL IN CITY OF GREENSBORO. WAS A 5.8 EARTHQUAKE FROM VA... WOW.”

Please note the capital letters. That’s how kids today yell on the Internet.

How shaky was it in the Piedmont — you know, on the Richter scale? Couldn’t tell you. N.C. A&T owns a seismograph but didn’t have it turned on. Never needed to.

True story.

Here’s another thing: You know how they say animals sense these things?

It’s true.

In Kernersville, Cari Amanda Graham’s Aussie dogs ran through the house barking.

In Greensboro, Molly Harris’ Rottweiler started howling.

“She never does that,” Harris said.

Apparently, Lynn Johnson’s children do.

She was fixing dinner in her western Randolph County home when she felt the rattling. She figured it was just the kids — ages 13, 11 and 7 — causing a ruckus in the bedroom.

Then her mom sent her a text from Kernersville: “We just had an earthquake.”

Well, that explains the rattling coffee tins on Johnson’s fridge. It does not, however, explain her kids.

Of course, there are people out there who will tell you that the earthquake was nothing special — that anyone who says it was scary is, well, just exaggerating. Perhaps a tad excitable.

Exaggerating? Excitable? Not scary? Tell that to Wendi Perry and her brother, who live west of Reidsville.

They looked under the house to see if the foundation had slipped and then scanned the sky for a low-flying plane.

“When we didn’t find nothing, we were like, 'OK, what the hell just happened?’” she said.

What happened was about a million stories got born.

Staff Writers Andrea Martin, Nancy McLaughlin, John Newsom, Donald W. Patterson and Jeri Rowe contributed to this report.

Contact Margaret Moffett Banks at 373-7031 or margaret.banks@news-record.com