Fire on the Mountain

After a very dry and breezy month, the forest we live in caught fire this past week.  The smoke could be seen for quite a distance and at night the sky in the north was a glow, as if the sun had decided to set in a new direction.

I scouted the fire, going to a ridge a half mile north and could see that the fire was within another half mile of the ridge.

We had to take a moment to think about what we would do should we need to leave our home if the fire came our way.  Where would we go, what would we take.  Then we thought about what it would mean if we lost what was left behind.

It is an exercise in thought a assessing ones values that proved quite comforting to us.  We realized that there was little we would actually need to take with us, that there was little that we could loose that would devastate us.  A car load for each of us to drive away with was really all we came down to needing, and then most of that was not need as much as want.

The things of real value are not tangible.  All those things that could go up in flames are just things and have no real lasting value.

We eventually got to talking about the positive side of having the property cleared by fire and then starting over from the ground up and how we'd be free to plan a house that we'd build rather than making the one we bought work for us, which it has and does quite well.  In the end there was a kind of freedom in the idea of loosing every thing that we had accumulated over our lives.

The fire burned to the north and then the wind turned and it came back to the south, but it had no fuel to burn as it had just used it all up.  The Spring has just begun and we have an entire summer ahead of us, and the possibility of more fires.

I suppose that knowing that there is little that we actually really need to have makes us rest a little easier and allows us to enjoy all that we do have as they are all luxuries.  What a luxurious life we lead, with more clothes, and food than we can carry.