Jessica Faces a Wildfire

Wildfires are running rampant in the western United States. Some have been sparked by lightning, others by humans, and they are doing horrific damage across the west. Many folks have been affected, including Jessica and her family. 

Jessica and her family live not only in the mountains, but ON a mountain, Dry Mountain to be exact.  Her home is on the highest edge of the neighborhood and the back yard opens right onto the wild part of the mountain. 

Craig with Cambria and Titan by the fort they built together on the mountainside above their home.

Their family loves to hike back into the canyons and hollows. When we visit, we watch elk come out in the evening to graze or the sun rise over the top of the mountain. It's absolutely beautiful.

It's terrifying, though, when the mountain is on fire. Over Labor Day weekend a fire was started on Bald Mountain which is next to Dry Mountain. People who were target shooting (despite the fact that there had been no rain for weeks and weeks) accidentally started the fire. Jessica took the shot below from her kitchen window. Terrifyingly beautiful and terrifyingly close.

Jessica and Andrew were camping with Sarah and her family and were about seven hours away when they learned of the wildfire and that it was  just two miles from their home. They packed up immediately and hit the road. As they got closer to Santaquin, roads were clogged with people evacuating from another fire by Springville and Mapleton, towns just to the north of Santaquin. 

Jessica's neighbor took this photo of the wildfire.

Another shot from Jessica's kitchen window. Later that night, she texted us the following message: 

Fortunately, rain began falling overnight - it had literally been weeks since the last rain so the timing was a real blessing. Jessica's neighbor instagrammed a spiritual experience she had had connectedto the fire.

Aside from a few hotspots, the fire was out after about five hours of rainfall.

Tuesday morning Jessica sent a more peaceful photo taken from her kitchen window. To the left is Dry Mountain (it's mostly green) and behind it you can see snowcapped Bald Mountain where the fire had been raging.  (I don't know the name of the mountain on the right.)

I am really, really thankful that no lives were lost in this fire and that the fire did not reach Jessica's home. I'm not sure I could live like that - give me a tornado over a wildfire any day! I know how to prepare and be safe for those! (A tornado on the ground that Craig and I spotted last year. It was moving away from us, so we took photos instead of heading to shelter.)

In Which I Take a Tumble

 When you get to be a certain age, the risk of falling rises. So does your fear of falling, especially if you are alone when it happens. Add in a couple of horses and you have the scenario I faced a week ago.

Abby and Sultanna had come up for a visit. I'd fed Abby her peppermints and was getting ready to leave when I noticed that I'd dropped one of her treats on the ground by her feet. It was close to the gate and I figured that I could just bend over and reach through the bars, and retrieve it. No problem, right? 

I can't squat any more because my knees are really weak, so I was bending as best I could, but I still couldn't reach that darn peppermint. I had my arm between two of the bars and I could almost touch the candy. (Meanwhile Abby and Sultanna had their noses right at my outstretched hand, checking to see if there were more treats to be had.)

It's kind of hard to describe what happened next. I gave one last stretch, leaning against the gate... and the gate suddenly swung open.

All the pastures are lower than the ground around the new barn and so there is a little hill you must go down when you enter them. I tumbled forward down that hill as the gate swung open, my arm, with a painful wrench, caught in the bars, and went down onto the ground under Abby and Sultanna's noses.

Since having my hip and knees replaced, I rarely get down on the floor or ground - it's too difficult to get up and I need assistance to do so. So now I found myself on the ground in front of two horses, plus a gate now open into a paddock that had no fence on the north side, and no one around to help me get up.

The owner of the agribusiness next door injured himself and putting his fence up is on hold. Tim has been kind enough to not complain and we simply have not used the paddock for horses for the last eight weeks. But, if Abby and Sultanna decided to come through that now open gate, they could conceivably hightail it for even greener pastures and be loose, an even bigger problem that the one I was already facing.

I do not remember how I got up off the ground after extricating my arm from the bars. (I do remember that part - I have a torn rotator cuff in that shoulder, and tumbling forward down the hill with my arm caught in the gate really, really hurt.) But somehow I found myself up on my feet, feeling very wobbly, and I pulled the gate closed so the horses did not come through. 

As I stood there and caught my breath, my arm hanging down because it hurt too much to move it, I realized that I had another problem. The gate was now closed, but how was I going to secure it so that it stayed shut? The chain was still there and I couldn't see any broken links - just what had happened? 

I looped the chain around the post and then fastened it like usual, examining it and trying to figure out why the gate had popped open. It was definitely closed and with the chain wrapped around the post and over the hook, I felt confident that it would not pop open again. Still very shaky, I drove home and then texted Tim to let him know that there might be a problem with the gate.

Tim being Tim, he was concerned that I was hurt. And, he went out immediately to check the gate to see if he could determine what had happened. We both are puzzled as to why the gate swung open like that. 

I didn't do my shoulder any favors when I caught it in the bars of the gate, but it is feeling better. And aside from some lingering bruises on my arm, I'm fine now. 

 

Fishy/Moment Dies

  Five years ago, I wrote about a classroom pet I'd just gotten for my students - a little two inch goldfish. Since I had had goldfish as pets before, and all of them had had life spans of under a year, I thought that this fish would have a similar life span.

Never, ever did I expect Fishy (her nickname at home) to live five years and even come home with me when I retired. I became terribly fond of her and enjoyed her presence in our home. That three gallon aquarium and itty bitty fish net were outgrown the very first couple of months of her life and she thrived in an aquarium in the corner of our dining room, growing to be a whopping 10 inches long!

She passed away today and I am so sad at her passing.  

Here's a picture of her taken a year or so ago, and below is the post I wrote about her when I got her in October, 2015. 

-------------------

I read somewhere that goldfish can only remember something for three seconds (who on earth did research on goldfish intelligence??) So, when a thought escapes us during the school day, we sigh and say, "Goldfish moment!"

I thought it might be fun to surprise the students with a REAL goldfish... named Moment!

 She's an orange, white, and black calico.

And seems to even have some personality - Moment likes to swim up to the glass when being observed and look right back at us.

It's been a while since I had a fish for a pet so I am a bit rusty on how to care for her, but she's been with us for a week and seems to be thriving.

-----

We decided to bury her in our stepping stone garden underneath the Great Blue Heron statue. We felt it appropriate to have a water bird over her grave. 

The aquarium in the dining room corner seems awfully sad and empty.

Good-bye, Fishy. I will miss you.