What excitement looks like in our life

On Saturday in the late afternoon, after a busy day spent over in the next valley going to some bigger town stores and the county fair, we were greeting grandpa who had just arrived for the weekend to do some hunting and meet Baby E for the first time (he was off on his boat for the summer and only just got back home recently). I looked over and heard him talking to someone, but Little M was right beside me, and papa was still in the house sleeping. It was one of the newish neighbors a ways down our little side valley, actually a cousin of a really good friend of mine, who we had only barely met in passing once or twice, although we know the rest of her local family very well.

She was saying she thought she saw a fire. We walked back a little bit and sure enough, there was smoke coming off the hillside just up from the house. Now my husband and I had been smelling little wafts of smoke on and off for 2 days, since a big storm rolled through after dark one night, but we figured we were either just imagining things, or it was from some distant fire. Nope, it was just smoldering slowly, and hadn't really picked up yet.

After calling it in to dispatch, I ran up and took some photos, which of course didn't turn out as I wasn't checking my settings closely enough and didn't glance at what the shots were turning out like until I got further away from the fire. I did get some neat ones from down on the road, and sometime later this week we'll hike up as a family and show Little M what it looked like and get some pictures of the tree that had been hit by lightning to start the fire, and the burn scar around it.

So after taking my pictures, I quickly hiked back down, as I had left grandpa in charge of the baby and Little M, so I wanted to get back down to them. When I got down there, grandpa asked if I had seen papa (he's visible in the white t-shirt in some of these pics!), as he had hiked up with a shovel and was starting to get the fire under control before the firefighters arrived on scene. I had totally missed him the way I came back down the ridge, but there he was, making sure the fire didn't spread. After a quick call in to the neighbors up valley on that side of the road, I just sat and watched my husband through the zoom lens of the camera, and kept an eye on Little M as the fire trucks started to arrive.

The mister came back down soon after the firefighters got up to the fire, and said he had gotten it out by the time they got there, but there was still hot spots to deal with so the local guys stayed up there for an hour or two taking care of those and cleaning up, then the DNR crews arrived to finish up and stayed until almost dark. It was pretty exciting, and the pictures were really neat, especially what with the double rainbow that was visible over the fire to us down on the road. The whole experience made me really grateful for neighbors & firefighters! Oh, and grandpa's who watch the kiddo's while the parents run around dealing with slight emergencies!

And that's what excitement looks like in our quiet, slow, rural life! :)