“Hey, Mom’s OK,” Hubby said tersely into the phone. My mind raced. Why wouldn’t my mother-in-law be OK? Did I forget that something was supposed to happen today? “What do you mean?” I asked.

“There was an explosion in Oslo. She’s OK.”

My mind kicked into sixth gear. I’d been pretty unplugged most of the morning, so really didn’t know what was going on in the world outside my bubble. I ran downstairs and flipped on the TV.

The Prime Minister’s office building in downtown Oslo had been bombed. And the beautifully ornate city whose streets I walked hundreds of times looked foreign to me, buildings with broken-out glass, mangled heaps of wreckage and dazed and bloodied Norwegians.

I kept flipping through the channels to find out more information because the news networks were only mentioning it here and there and the Google searches didn’t have much more. At that time, the death toll was one.

I turned Dora the Explorer on the TV for Logan and BBC on my laptop to watch the story unfold.

My mother-in-law, who is one of the most wonderful people I know, was leaving work that Friday afternoon to go home. (It’s Norway, they always take off “early” on Fridays. Almost like people in Chicago.)

She works a couple blocks from the Prime Minister’s office and was going to take her usual bus home. Then, a pair of cute shoes caught her eye, so she decided to catch the next bus. After all, the shoes were really cute and she wasn’t in a rush to get home.

While in the shoe store, she heard a thunderous noise, looked up and the windows bulged in. They shattered, glass sprayed everywhere. The store’s private security guards quickly guided her and another customer out the back and into the parking garage because they thought a gas line had ruptured. She walked out of the garage and because she was now on another block, everything looked normal. No hint of the destruction.

A bus pulled up at a nearby stop that would take her home, so she got on. Shortly after arriving at the house, Hubby called her, panicked. She was fine and didn’t know why Hubby was so worried about a gas line rupture. He told her what really happened.

We feel so fortunate that my mother-in-law was unharmed, that she managed to get out of Oslo before they shutdown the city and that her love of cute shoes kept her out of harm’s way.

*It wasn’t until about an hour later that news seeped out about the horrific mayhem on the island of Utoya. My heartfelt condolences go out to everyone in my home away from home: Norge.