Fire

With harvest mostly in the bag, and football coming up this weekend, it's feeling a lot more like fall than summer.  We haven't mowed our lawn in well over a month and it hasn't needed it.  The grasses are all browns and tans and crackly.  Everything is. You can feel the dryness just by looking all around.  It seems to me like a strong bout of wind would dissolve everything into dust before my eyes. The air is already so dusty and smoky that the sky looks a pallid tone of whitish gray.  Last week's rain has been sucked into the ground or evaporated and we are again under severe Red Flag Fire Alert.

Which is why I was nearly as alarmed as Jeff when he stomped into the house just a few minutes ago and immediately picked up a phone book.  I asked him what was wrong.  Fire. To the south of here, he said. Sure enough, I looked out the window and a column of black smoke was rising to the sky maybe 8-10 miles south of us.  He was trying to call some people who live in that area to see what was up, if he was needed to help put it out.  Turns out, someone was actually doing a controlled burn of some grassy CRP, presumably so they could reintroduce crop to that land at some point either this fall or spring.

But seriously?  Today, of all days? I actually heard on the local radio station this morning that Hill County is also under a fire ban with its Red Flag Alert.  I mean, to me, it makes sense that you should NOT burn anything when the fire risk is so high.  At least it's not windy (for the moment) so chance of the controlled burn getting out of hand is low.  It still just makes me a little nervous.