I'm writing this because it's just a major thing happening in my life (my world), but before I get started let me just say, yes, I care about the environment.. I know many will be upset with me, thinking that I don't, but I assure you, I do...
We live on 7 acres of land, a lot of it is wooded, in the country.. When we moved in, we just started burning our trash because the previous owners did and there was a pit at the back of the yard for it. We kept meaning to just get trash pickup and stop burning it, but something a little more pressing (or so we thought) always came up and we would put it off another couple of weeks. I think it's safe to say, now, that we've burned our last bit of trash! My husband took out the trash a little while ago and burned it. I was inside doing laundry and cleaning the house. My husband came to the back door and yelled for our oldest son to come out quickly. I figured he just needed help because he was working on his truck, but thought there was a chance there was something fairly cool he wanted to show him since there's often deer in our backyard. Being the nosey mom wanting an excuse to take a break from cleaning, I went to the back door to see what was up, what I saw quickly surged my adrenaline more than it has been in a while! I didn't see them at first, then my husband came rushing by with a large bucket of water.. I looked ahead of where he was going, only to see a large portion of the woods behind the house on fire! He had checked on the trash fire and discovered that apparently some of it had blown out or something and caught the woods on fire! We stretched the water hose out as far as it would go, which was about the middle of the burned area, and started spraying and filling up buckets. We were blessed in that a lot of it had just burned itself out, but we still had to chase it down around the edges of the burn, and the hose wouldn't reach most of it! The three of us worked together for a long time and finally got it all out! Some areas were still smoking a bit and we're watching it to be sure it doesn't start back up, but I believe we're out of danger at least! All I could think of was Smokey the Bear, shaking his head at us.. It wasn't a huge area that was burned, but still quite a little bit, and could have been much worse. I made a point to use this as a teaching tool for my son, since he's a bit of a fire bug, telling him to remember how quickly it had spread and hard it was to put out.. and NOT to play with fire, ever!
Many of you are going to ask why didn't we just call the fire department? Well, here where we live, if you live outside city limits you have to pay a yearly maintenance fee to the fire department, I know we never paid it and we're pretty sure the previous owners didn't either, I don't even think we've ever even gotten anything in the mail asking us to. But, it has been proven that if you don't pay this fee, the fire dept will not come put out your fire! It has caused some controversy around here.. I think it's time to inquire as to how to pay this fee and I am planning to go get trash pickup on Monday!
Again, please don't yell at me or whatever for this, it's just a bit of drama in my day and I felt like posting it..
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