Idyllic Chick

So I got up this morning, 5:30, same as always. Peed. Put on my jammies. Put Monty on the leash and took him outside. Walking out the side door, I heard what sounded like someone walking through the woods, coming towards our house. A really, really big someone. When I woke up a bit and realized that a swamp monster wasn’t attacking from East, I thought the noise might be that of the folks on the property beyond the swamp continuing to clear their property. At 5:30am? Then out of the left corner of my eye I saw a glow. ‘Ohhh, it’s a fire. The neighbor is burning his trash,’ I considered. Don’t laugh. Trash burning before breakfast is not unheard of in my part of the woods. ‘Wow. That’s a lot of trash. Monty, are you going to pee or not? Holy cow THAT’S HIS HOUSE!’

I’d never seen a house on fire before. The weirdest part was that there were no firemen, no cops, no paramedics. How can a house be on fire and no one know about it? I should call someone.

I told the 911 operator that my neighbor’s house is on fire. After getting the location and other important information he asked ‘How do you know it’s on fire? Do you see smoke?’ Yes. Yes there is smoke because the house is ENGULFED IN FLAMES. ‘Is there anyone in the house? Can someone get inside to see if anyone is in there?’ What part of ENGULFED IN FLAMES do you not understand?

Chris and I put the dogs in our house and wandered out towards the road to help direct the emergency personnel to the road to take to get to the neighbor’s. It seemed to take forever for them to arrive. When we finally saw the lights approaching from the county road, it looked like they paused, but kept going up the county road. So I called 911 again to corral them back our direction. At one point this operator asked me, ‘Do you have a key to their house or anything?’ Key? Lady, you don’t need no key to get in there now.

I’ve never spoken to any of our neighbors. Chris has talked to this one, John, a couple of times when Chris had to go retrieve Monty from his yard. We were fairly certain that John wasn’t home because when he’s there the big flatbed that he drives is parked in our yard. Chris said that it was there last night all loaded up. I found out later that he left about 11:00pm last night, and that as of this morning no one knew how to reach him on the road. The fire marshal will come later today to see if the cause of the fire can be determined.

We know that his animals (At least three dogs and a cat) are all outside pets, so they were all probably hiding in the swamp this morning. I’ll keep my eye out for them this evening and make sure they are fed. And I’ll be reading over my fire insurance policy tonight, and hugging my husband and pets.