First (and hopefully last) Fire of 2012

I had the pleasure of bringing  Sara home from school on April 19th.  Of course, we couldn't leave right away because we needed to get an afterschool snack at the Art Gallery - ice cream!  We enjoyed wandering around and checking a few things out while I finished my cone before driving.  (Safety first!)  She entertained me with all sorts of stories and chatter on the drive to Grandma and Grandpa's, where she would spend the afternoon with her little sister until practice and whatnot wrapped up for Marie in town.

I had just gotten home and had a chance to go to the bathroom when the pager went off.  Thomas and I share a pager and a radio for the fire department.  The pager is usually silent until paged, which then turns on the scanner for information about what is happening.  We had just had a test page the week before, so we both scrambled to get out the door as we heard that there was a tree fire at a residence on the other side of Miami. 

Tom, Pop, Gayle and I responded and found a tree on fire from a lightning strike to a neighboring tree.  It was rotted down the middle, so the fire was running vertically through it.  We let ourselves out to the pasture, and Tom promptly felled the tree to make it easier to fight.  It was a quick job, made easier by wind blowing to the SE keeping the embers from falling into the dry grass on the other side of the fence. 

We can only hope that might be the last call, but all are on guard as the drought makes us still very vulnerable.  Here's to hoping for more rain!