Where There's Smoke
A great plume of smoke rises continually from one of the backyards that borders mine. It’s too early to be burning leaves, which is illegal anyway. What are they burning? Evidence? Certainly they aren’t having a cook-out. Not at 8 a.m. on a Sunday.
Years ago when I lived in a different house, I let my dog out before going to work one afternoon and smelled smoke though didn’t see any. The smell was so strong I considered calling 911. But, I wasn’t sure what to say. I wasn’t sure I had an actual emergency to report. So, I went to work. By the time I got home that night it was raining and had been raining hard most of the evening. I discovered that the house behind mine had burned! The home owner had been in the shower when some kind of short from the bathroom fan ignited. She had run next door in a towel! By the time I got home and looked across the fence, the rain had added to what was already a sodden mess, but the house was not beyond repair. I couldn’t help but wonder if when I smelled smoke, had the neighbor already run out of her house or was she obliviously naked in the shower? I think a little differently about bathroom fans now.
Years later, in the same neighborhood, I was in my front yard getting into my car when once again I smelled smoke, something like burning newspapers. Remembering what had happened before, I walked into the street, trying to identify where the smell was coming from. I didn’t see anything, so I figured it was a barbecue or something. How could it be a house fire twice? I got in the car and went to where ever it was I was going. When I returned, I learned that while I was away the street had been filled with emergency vehicles because a house not far down the street had burned! The owners had just remodeled and something wasn't wire correctly. What?
Right now, as I sit here writing this, the smoke over my backyard fence is still rising up in great blue gray plumes. What are they burning?
Another time, when I still lived in that neighborhood, a woman shouting and banging on the door of the house across the street caught my attention. She was so frantic that I stepped outside onto my front porch. Massive gray black clouds of smoke billowed up from the back of the house. There was no question what was happening this time, and I raced to dial 911. At nearly the same moment, a car stopped adjacent to the house, and I could see a woman in her car making a call. Surely another 911. The frantic woman who had been banging on the door moved away as black smoke began to pour through the front windows.
The next call I made was to the homeowner who was a nurse, at work. Our boys were friends, and in that neighborhood, most of us had each other’s phone number. There is nothing quite so bad as calling to tell someone their house is on fire.
When the firetrucks arrived and the firemen smashed in, neighbors began to gather, including one of the boys who lived in the house. He stood on the front lawn in awe, watching smoke and flames rise out of his home. I ran to him and picked him up, though he was too big to be carried, seven or eight years old, and moved him to the sidewalk with the others. When the firemen chucked the dog crate into the yard, I took the smoke laden Yorkies to my house and shampooed them in my bathtub. They turned the water black.
I’ve had my fill of house fire incidents. They’ve made me wary. My French and Italian friends and students used to ask me why Americans build their houses out of wood. After all, wood burns! It gets eaten by insects!
Over the fence, the smoke in my neighbor’s back yard is petering out. I wonder. Earlier, when I was outside with the dog, I heard raised voices over there. I stopped for a minute, but it didn’t sound like fighting this time. But you know, it gets my imagination tumbling. Now, over there, a door just slammed. Maybe she is away and he burned all her things, or burned the rest of the things she has never come back to get (the voices I heard this time were male).
Hmmm. Three squirrels chase around the trunk of a great water oak, like these stories in my brain. The wind is picking up. Rain is on the way. And now smoke again, large white clouds. I can hear music now too, loud, raucous rock and roll from over there. It is not even 9 a.m., but they’ve got the party started I guess. Better than domestic drama, and definitely better than a house fire.