At 3:45 AM

At 3:45 this morning, I awoke to hear Mike trying to get one of our dogs to stop barking. That's when I noticed the smell of smoke. Then, we heard a fire engine from a nearby city coming up our road.

I threw the shade open and looked to see a tower of billowing smoke down the street. I think my sleepy state kept me from flat-out panicking, but the smoke was rising from the direction of Mike's parents' house!

Mike hopped right in his truck and left. He had to take the long way around because of the fire trucks on our road. It was a long 7 minutes in which yet another tanker from a neighboring city passed our house to help out. Mike came back and told me it wasn't his parents' house, but it was in a group of houses in a small wooded section between here and there.

Our town is small. We know everyone and we especially know everyone on our street. It was little comfort knowing that it wasn't a family member's place. Now it was potentially a friend's house.

It took a while to fall asleep with our hearts still pounding and our minds still racing. It was hard to get up when that alarm went off at 5:30. I found out from one of the parents that I babysit for that it was just a neighbor's garage, but it was leveled. He called after dropping his son off and said there isn't much left save the skeleton of a car and some steel lockers along one wall.

Let's count the blessings- no one was hurt and at least it rained yesterday. It hadn't rained here in several weeks and it is terribly dry. Had it not rained so much yesterday, the grass and trees would have been like candlewicks drawing the flames out to other buildings. That is one wake-up-call I never want to get again.