.Friday Firesmith

Friday Firesmith – the death of trees

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When I moved out here to Hickory Head back in 2001 or so, the front yard had this giant red oak tree in it, the backyard had three or four big trees, one stump of a giant tree that was ten feet tall, and the back acre was nothing but vines and bramble except for a few big trees.

Now, twenty-five years later, the Red Oak in the front yard died along with one of the three water oaks on the west side, nearly all the big trees in the back yard are dead, but one, and I’ve lost control of the bramble in the back again.

Water has been the main problem, too little, then too much, and then damn man, when is this rain going to stop?  Hurricanes three out of the last four years have been a big problem.

You can believe in climate change, global warning, or not. But in the last five years I’ve seen south Georgia go from a predictable environment to wetter, hotter, windier, and unstable. Trees are being killed in this region by the hundred of thousands. North Florida’s timber industry was wiped out for a generation by hurricane Michael.

Just here, just losing trees to the west of me, the house is hotter due to the loss of shade. The compost pile is beset with weeds because it is no longer in the shade. The pond lost many of the trees that once surrounded it. The creatures who live in this area lost dozens of Oaks, so their acorns as lost we well.

The squirrels could at one point in time, travel from the woods west of the house, through the trees and never touch the ground getting to any point on my property. The front yard is down to one Live Oak and the back has two. The far back of the property has one giant and two smaller Live Oaks.

As more trees are felled by the wind, those left as left with as much defense as they have known in the past. The water oaks in the back of the property grew up tall, not thick, because there were so many of them. But one by one, those on the edge have been felled by water or wind, and now the rest stand more exposed.

Back when I first started putting up fences so the dogs could have room to roam, I also cleared a lot of the vines and bramble. The dogs helped by running around the perimeter and beating a path out there, and then making another bisecting at the back of the property, and slowly there were connections between paths and paths around thing they like to climb on.

I thought, I truly believed, once the first tree in the back was tall enough to house a Cardinal nest, and they returned for years to nest in that same tree, that when I left this place, feet first or relocation, I would see it as a place with more trees.

I was wrong.

Take Care,

Mike

This picture shows how much the bramble has grown. It would swallow Wrex

this tree fell Monday night

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Friday Firesmith – 300

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Two years ago, I was still removing storm debris from my yard, and I will be doing it next year, too. I started working right after lunch, and took a six pack with me. The heat was enough to make me sweat as I worked, and used the chainsaw, and then started drinking once I was done with the Many Toothed Death Machine.

I’ve seen men who have used chainsaws all their lives make mistakes that cost them blood, skin, clothes, and in one case, part of a shin. I’ve never been drunk enough to pick up a chainsaw while I was drinking. Or jump off a dock and cannon ball an eleven-foot-long alligator.

The six pack was gone in due order, the third debris pile grew larger and larger, and after the sixth beer, I lay in my garden wagon, yes, it’s pretty big, and took a nap in the woods. The sun was shining brightly, and wind was blowing gently, and I dozed off, my legs dangling out of the back of the garden wagon.

I awoke with the sun shifted hard to the west, my back hurting, and one of my feet asleep. The beer was gone, and I had to pee. But I remember at that moment wondering why I drank the way I did. I brushed the question off and kept working.

The issue danced around in my head. I was only drinking a six pack a week, one day dedicated to self-anesthetizing, and that was all. But it was costing me money, and it was costing me the down time that I couldn’t write, or drive, or get on social media. Now, social media isn’t necessary, or particularly useful most of the time, but like chainsaws, social media is not something you should do while drinking.

A woman I knew many years ago contacted me and wanted to get together again, but the next day she sent me a message saying she had been drunk and didn’t want to mess up her marriage. I think it was already messed up, but was happy to see her pull out of a dive.

Drinking, like chainsaws, can precipitate disasters both large and small. I have to use a chainsaw, and an axe, and a couple of other tools in debris removal. I made sure what I was doing that was truly dangerous was done before the first bottle was open. Staggered a bit, feeling no pain, I put my tools away as I ought to, cleaned the sawdust and dirt off the saw, sharpened the axe, and took a long hot shower. Day done.

But I realized I was working around the alcohol. I was scheduling around it. I was planning what I did around six bottles of 9.5% beer when I might have gotten in another hour or so.

This seems small, a tiny thing, unlike people who wreck cars and sleep with people they know better than to sleep with, for whatever reason that turns out to be a bad thing. At the same time, at this stage of my life, time is running ever faster.

So Sunday with be my 300th day of no drinking.

Take Care,

Mike

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friday firesmith – Dolly

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I grew up in the 1960s, in South Georgia, where most of the older people, and by older I mean anyone over twenty-five, listened to country music. It was a religious thing, where country music, and by default, those who played and sang it, were holy. Rock and Roll was evil. Children were to be seen and not heard, and children certainly were not allowed to have an opinion on music and they would listen to whatever their parents decided they would listen to and they would be happy, too.

I was not.

Like the French Resistance, we knew a guy, okay, an older kid, who had a tiny transistor radio with an earpiece. We would tune into one of the few not country stations, AM at that, and listen to top 40, which was as close to rock as we were going to get.

I never liked country music mostly because it was forced upon me, as was my taste in clothing, food, television programming, and just about every other aspect of life.

Dolly Parton was an enigma to me. Dressed like a two-dollar hooker, with unimaginably large breasts, and with a voice that sounded like someone in water over their head yelling, “Shark!” Dolly Parton’s singing was irritating. Worse, a lot of it was smarmy. And as I grew older, Dolly Parton was a wig wearing ghost who haunted the radio stations.

But then there were books.

I grew up being able to pick and choose what I read. It was one of the few areas of absolute freedom I had in personal choice. I read books like it was a religion. I pretended to be sick to get out of school so I could read more. I called in sick from work so I could read. I fell asleep reading.

And Dolly was giving away free books to kids, little kids. I was not going to start singing, “Jolene” in the shower but I started paying attention to what this person was doing. Books were my currency in deciding whether or not I could be friends with, or even like someone.

Dolly’s “Imagination Library” has donated over 300 million books to children under five across the globe.

Dolly started the “Buddy Program” which teamed seven and eight graders who would receive five hundred dollars each if they both graduated from high school. Drop out rates dropped from over one third to single digits.

DWF Home

Dolly’s, “Dollywood Foundation” in an international charity that has stepped in and stepped up many times since its creation in 1988. Spanning the globe like a giant blonde wig, this is an organization who had helped after wildfires, Covid, and much more.

I rather listen to a coon hound being cut in half longways with a plastic spork than hear Dolly Parton sing. But as far as being a good human being, Dolly Parton is a fucking Saint.

Her death is one of the few celebrities I will mourn for the rest of my life. Irreplaceable, one of a kind, and one of the best human beings that ever irritated me with her voice, I will die loving Dolly Parton with all my heart and books.

Take Care,

Mike

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friday firesmith – Trina

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On a bitterly cold morning back in 2017 or so, I got out of the office because I simply didn’t want to be there. I wanted to write. I wanted to sit down in front of a laptop and see what happened, because if I do sit down in front of a laptop, I’m going to write.

Retirement was a couple of years away, I thought it was more than that, but I knew it was somewhat close. Still, I had to keep up appearances of actually caring about the job. The drag of doing something I didn’t really enjoy was heavy that morning and a light rain began as if the day wasn’t dreary and uncomfortable enough.  

I stopped at a Waffle House to get some coffee, decided to get a second breakfast because it was cold outside, and I wondered if I should just go home. The waitstaff at this place knows me, like the idea I tip well, and I’ll let them pick out music on the juke box.

A woman is sitting at the counter, and she smiles as I enter. Young, pretty, dressed in clothes more suited for much warmer weather, and the waitstaff shook her head at me when she saw me looking.

“She’s a hooker,” waitstaff whispered to me as she put a mug of coffee down. There’s no point in the menu or asking what I want. She speaks each item as she writes.

“She looks cold,” I reply in something that isn’t a whisper and waitstaff giggles. The woman in question is not wearing a bra.

“Want to buy her breakfast?” Waitstaff is poking at me now. She and I have talked about seeing one another in a more social setting, but I caught her taking off her wedding ring one day. She leaves it on now, and our flirting is harmless.

“Care to join me, ma’am?” I call out and the woman glides over to my booth and sits down with a leer. Waitstaff becomes professional suddenly, no pun intended, and takes her order.

“I’m Candy,” she says.

“Sweet.” I reply and Candy laughs the way women do when a man isn’t really that funny, but she’s pumping up his ego.

“You look cold, Candy,” I say, and she giggles.

“They could use some warming up. Thanks for breakfast. I owe you one,” Candy is in full business mode now, trying to figure out if breakfast is as much as she will get, or if I’m interested in more than that.

We trade flirts, she changes her name and tells me her real name in Trina, and she needs a ride to Adel, which isn’t that far away. She’s slowly working her way into my truck, and a destination, and I remain slightly noncommittal. But it’s raining, and I give in.

Finally, on the road to Adel, I asked Trina what questions she tired of people asking her and she laughs hard.

“One, how did you get started being a hooker. Two, aren’t you afraid, and three, how much money do you make,” Trina counts them on her fingers, and laughs.

The rain turns into sleet, and Trina tells me she likes the way the flecks of ice look like silver. She asks me if I want to get high and I tell her I can’t, and she can’t smoke pot in the truck.

“We could get a room,” she says, and honestly, it’s tempting because she’s a good conversationalist, but I’m wary of what might be lurking about in her blood.

We get to Adel and she asks to be let out at the truck stop there and we sit and talk for a while. The rain lets up, the sun comes out, but it’s getting colder. She asks me for enough money for some coffee, and I fork over a five. Trina then asks me for a pen, and she picks up the pad of sticky notes and writes. I think she’s giving me her number, but she takes the note, folds it, and asks me not to read it until I’m gone. I watch her walk away, the swing practiced and perfect. I read the note.

(4) Do you get tired of being treated differently because you sell sex?

Yes.

Take Care,

Mike

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Friday firesmith – trump is free, America soon may not be

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Americans are tired of wars in a time when gas is flirting heavily with four bucks a gallon, and there’s talk of marriage. But Trump is having a fire sale, and everything and anything is on the block. Want to produce explosive diarrhea lettuce? Done. Want to do a shoddy job on the reflecting pool? Trump arrests a guy on a bike. Want to be Attorney General? Agree to a billion dollar slush fund for Trump’s pals and you’re in!

But the Iranians…

They aren’t playing Trump Ball at all. They’re acting like they want to control an area they live in, and they aren’t going to allow Trump to lie his way out of it, either. Trump, who had made lying so common it no longer registers with the cultists, cannot understand why Iran keeps ratting him out over his lies about the peace treaty he keeps saying exists, but Iran keeps saying does not.

Worse, infinitely worse, people are beginning to question where the money went. We invaded Venezuela, kidnapped their president, and it was over in a couple of days. Trump personally took control over some of their tankers, had them sail to Bharain, and the tankers, and their cargo, were never heard from again.

But still… We have a trillion dollar defense budget. We rolled over Venezuela in a few days, and Trump declared victory in Iran, the first time, on the first day of murdering school girls. Then declarations the war was over came out on a near daily basis. Along with Trump threatening to destroy Iran’s civilization, which makes no sense if the war was already over.

But it was not and it is not.

Now Trump has discovered we’re almost out of bullets.

Then there are the photos from the American super carrier Gerald R Ford. Raw sewage flooding the decks and meals made of one piece of lunch meat and half an apple. Is that all we can afford to feed our sailors? Then there was the mysterious fire that was labeled as a laundry room incident that sent the carrier in for repairs. After eleven months at sea, the Ford returned to the states, but I’m thinking there isn’t a line for reenlistment. The word mutiny was tossed about during the fire, but no one is talking about that anymore.

American bases all over the Middle East have been destroyed. We have no clear indication as to who gave Iran the targeting intel, but only a few countries could have, and one of them is China. Russia is getting the hell kicked out of them in Ukraine, and we’ve lost a war to Iran. China isn’t fighting anyone and their stock is soaring.

One hundred days from midterms, and Trump is pulling out all the stops on being Grifter-in-Chief. He’s already filled his cabinet with yes men and minions, and every distraction is one more day the Epstein Files aren’t headline news.

But it is one hundred days from midterms. Trump knows that if he cannot wreck the legal system and tear things in American down low enough, he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison.

He’ll do anything to keep that from happening. Even if America is destroyed in the process.

Take Care,

Mike

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friday firesmith – August 2026

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Two months of brutally high temperatures saw two weeks straight of 95+ weather carrying heat at one point. Rain was scarce and did little but make the humidity worse. The gnats this year are swarms of tiny flies that arrive two feet after you step into the sauna that was once your yard.

It’s the 7th of August today, and while it’s not cool in any sense of the word, the temperatures are only in the low to mid 90s. The humidity hasn’t picked up until after dawn for a few days now.

Don’t get me wrong here. Mid August and the first part of September can be horrible in their own right. But Summer begins in Mid May in South Georgia. Ticks are a daily hazard a long time before Spring ends.

At the beginning of June, I redid my well house. The gaps between the boards were growing, the roof was rotted, and it was time. We had a cold spell last year that saw a few days of cold in the upper teens, but I didn’t lose any pipes. I ran a heater in the pump house and couldn’t get the temps up above 40. Now, because the insulation is so good, the water in the tap is warm when it first arrives.

And here’s the thing. In 2023, we had a foot of rain to fall in six hours. We had snow, six inches that stayed for four days, back in January 2024. At sixty-five, I’ve seen snow about a half dozen times in my life. Snow that hung around long enough to like it, about three times. But the Blizzard of ’24 (yes I am kidding,) with that much snow hanging around like it did was far out of the ordinary. Severe weather events are becoming more ordinary, and they’re severity is getting worse.

Last year Hurricane Helene hit inland Georgia with high CAT Three winds of 127 miles per hour almost one hundred miles inland. She then went to North Carolina and hit so hard rivers changed their course due to the flooding.

I’m an outside type of guy. Years ago, even during hurricanes and high water, things evened out. Right now, in the back of my property, it’s overgrown and littered with dead trees. The back part of my yard is head high with weeds. I can’t keep up with the damage or the growth of vegetation anymore. Yeah, I am older. But even working on it three or four times a week, I’m losing the battle. All the dead trees haven’t fallen yet. All the wet spots are still greener than ever, and dead trees have flooded the area with sunlight now. It’s also hotter because of the lack of shade.

My home environment is changing.

I’m a bad hurricane year away from the search for a more sane part of the world to live in.

Take Care,

Mike

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friday firesmith – the war on persia

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General Minoru Genda, an Imperial Japanese Navy flight officer, JASDF general and politician served in World War Two. He is best known for helping to plan the attack on Pearl Harbor and Midway.

As the flight officer, it was his responsibility to develop an air defense plan for the fleet during the Battle of Midway. When asked by Admiral Yamamoto what their plan was if the American aircraft arrived, Genda replied, “We will defeat them!”

As it turns out, Genda was not only wrong, but horribly so. At the Battle of Midway, American pilots in planes that were far inferior to the Japanese, sunk four Japanese aircraft carriers and downed many Japanese aircraft. Many more Japanese planes sank with their carriers, or landed in the sea, their pilots rescued by the Japanese navy.

The Japanese High command sent the surviving pilots to remote airfield in the Solomon chain, notably Rabal. Many never returned home to their families.

Later, after the war, Genda called Midway, “The fruit of arrogance.”

Trump said the day after Putin invaded Ukraine, that Putin was smart for  “just walking in and taking it.” Four years later, no believes Ukraine will fall. Many think Putin will. We know Trump is gone in about two years and some change. Hmmm, a lot of change.

Trump bombed Iran at the behest of Israel. The missiles flew and Trump, overstimulated by the fireworks, demanded “unconditional surrender,” but that never happened. Record high gas prices and a depletion of our missile supply did happen. But Trump was never truly prepared to go to war with Iran. Bolstered by his kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, Trump might have thought he could bully his way through the Middle East.

Trump was terribly wrong, more so than even Genda but for the same reasons. Trump is incapable of understanding why he’s lost the war.

Iran is a land of mountains and the people there have been there for quite some time. 

Persia was a civilization two thousand years before America was formed. Their sense of history goes back a lot longer than a fat man painted orange wearing diapers.

The Japanese had every reason to be self-assured in war. They had run amok in the waters off Southeast Asia, and had taken the Philippines, wrecked Pearl Harbor, sank British ships and had taken Singapore, a trillion dollar asset in today’s money, and no one could stop them.

But the Americans knew they were coming, and the Japanese were caught out of position, and with many of their planes with dry tanks.

Trump went into the war with Iraq without any considerations as to how to end the war. He thought “unconditional surrender” would occur on the first day, the day he first declared he had won the war, and from that point on, Trump has simply no idea what to do.

China is helping Iran. Iran with that help, had targeted and destroyed American bases in the region. Now, Trump is scrambling to rebuild and restock, and rearm places he doesn’t have the wherewithal to defend. He’s lost, totally lost, the Strait of Hormuz to the Iranians. The Red Sea is in jeopardy and midterms are racing towards Trump like a wet box of Depends.

And Trump is still in the Epstein Files.  Thousands of times.

Take Care,

Mike

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friday firesmith – the haunted house

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Way back in the 1960s, my family lived in the small town of Blakely Georgia, a town famous for nothing at all except having a peanut butter factory that let contaminated peanut butter to kill seven people nationwide with a salmonella outbreak. That was many years ago, and I haven’t been back to that town in more years than that.

The road going to school, and we rode our bikes to school, was dirt, so those kids worried about their clothes getting muddy would ride slow. We rode fast and got dirty. Then they paved the road one year and ruined it.

A green and white house at the end of the road had home made signs that read, “No Trespassing” and “Keep out!” but we never saw anyone in the house or a car in the yard. We kids decided it was haunted. We had no reason to think ghosts had written the signs, but that didn’t stop us.

The yard wasn’t mowed on a regular basis, weeds popped up, the fence around the yard, which looked terrible even to kids, eventually fell over and it disappeared. We worried the ghost was now free to roam the earth and that’s not a bad beginning for a ghost story.

Yet over the years, just a few actually, but three or four years for a ten year old is almost half a lifetime, we ran out of reasons to believe in ghosts. A family with two little kids moved into the house, and since they were little kids we suspected the ghosts would eat them, not that there was a reason to believe that ghosts had to eat.

Then they bused us to the other side of town, to the middle school and we stopped riding our bikes as much. Suddenly, we were in high school and one day I went by the haunted house and they were tearing it down.

My family had moved to another neighborhood by that time and no one rode bikes to school when they could drive. The stories we would have told about the ghosts murdering the family, and as far as I know no one was murdered at all, would have kept us going, but it was too late . I realize now, having driven by the place where the haunted house once stood, it wasn’t ghosts that were haunting that house, but us.

What there a house in your home town people thought was haunted?

Take Care,

Mike

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friday firesmith – after the flood

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For two and a half years the back part of my property was flooded. One seriously freakish rain event came in on the 12th of April, 2023, and over the next two years, three hurricanes would pass through, giving me a cat, but not giving me my land back.

It is fortunate I didn’t lose a dog, or a cat, during this time because there wasn’t enough dry land out here to dig a grave.

Some things I learned about having flooded property:

It’s cool as hell to kayak around a place you’ve only walked. That gets old pretty quick because having a flooded property means there so much more you cannot do.

Trees die when they’re submerged in water for too long. I lost a pine that was close to one hundred feet high, a Live Oak that had a serious lean to it fell over the first hours of the Flood, and it was nearly two hundred years old, and a good dozen or so trees close to the edge died, too.

The water finally dried up in July of 2025, and I had to scramble to get the fence back up before the dogs realized it was down. The Big Pine, well tall enough to tag the house, got the fence instead, and in that I was content.

Someone asked me if my compost pile was dead, and I hesitated. Dead? Yeah, as it turns out compost piles can drown. Mine did. Also, it takes a while for the engine to start turning again, and it’s finally cranked back up, almost a year after the water left.

But the environment of the back of my property has gone through a change. Many trees died, so there’s a lot more open sky between the branches. That brings in sunlight, and one thing I never truly grasped was this: floodwater, especially if it’s grown pond scum on top of it, is incredibly fertile.

A patch of land in the backyard had never seen floodwaters but it stayed wet for nearly two years. Soft rushes grew there, and a willow tree. I have never had either on my property. Pond birds, wood storks, herons, egrets, and ducks were spotted swimming or wading over the compost pile. The area was far too wet to mow, so now about a quarter of my backyard is still covered in weeds.

Worse, infinitely worse, the dead trees are all falling down now. My compost pile has been a favorite target of Water Oaks breaking apart and falling, but I have plans for these dead logs. They will be cut to serve as a perimeter of the compost pile.

The irony that I will now use more water keeping the compost pile wet, because of the overabundance of sunlight, is not lost on me.

When I first moved out here, twenty-five years ago or so, the back of the property was overgrown with weeds and vines. I hacked away at them, and saplings appeared once I fenced the area in, and released the dogs back there. The dogs scared the deer away, and the saplings grew. The first tree that grew tall enough to house a Cardinal nest died in the flood.

Nature carries on. My brief time here will be erased sooner or later, and all traces of my existence will disappear. Unless one of the trees I saved from vines and deer continues on and spreads its seeds throughout the property.

Oddly, I can accept that, if it is the only thing left of me on this earth.

Take Care,

Mike

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friday firesmith – tis the 4th of july

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“Tis it’s the 4th of July. Another June has gone by, and when they light up our town I think what a waste of gunpowder and sky.” Aimee Mann, 4th of July.

The 4th of July fell on a Sunday and the town of Leslie Georgia, population 500 or so, threw a party at the pool. We had a contest involving a watermelon smeared with Vaseline, one team of kids trying to get it to one side of the pool and another trying to move it in the opposite direction. We had innertube races and I got robbed of that victory. And the lifeguard poured some gasoline in the water, set it fire and dove through it from the Life Guard’s stand.

Then a few Roman candles and sparklers were lit, we ate the watermelons, and as the sun sank low in the sky, everyone went home or to another party.

“It’s one of my faults that I can’t quell my past

I ought to have gotten it gone,”  4th of July, Aimee Mann.

Gerald Ford was President of the United States, and no once really spoke a single word about him all day. There was a party in Washington DC, everyone had a great time, and no one was waving a flag with Ford’s name on it. The National Mall of full of people, and Philadelphia had a lot of tall ships in the harbor. It was an epic day for America. I know the pool party doesn’t seem like much, but the whole day felt different. We were living in historic time, but the day was important for the nation as a whole, and we felt it.

I haven’t felt it in a while. After reading, “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson, I haven’t felt the same. The idea American’s would invest so much of their emotional well being in one man is, to me, unbelievable. I never thought after so many civilizations have fallen because of one ruler who led them all to ruin, voters would be smarter.

And it’s the one thing I thought we had learned from the fall of Richard Nixon. I thought after Nixon we would know better than to trust a man that morally bereft.

Yet here we are.

American voters have to step off the treadmill of party politics. There is no Left, or Right. There are words invented to divide. There are no Republican or Democrat voters, only American voters. There is no one in office who is held accountable by the voters until the voters decide they’ve had enough of two sides of the same coin.

You do not donate enough to their reelections for them to care about you.

Unless you start voting them, all of them, out, and electing candidates you actually know something about. And that something would be where they get their money.

At some point, Ford, who also served on the Warren Commission that determined the cover story in the JFK assassination was true, decided to pardon Nixon.

I wonder if some sort of deal had been struck, and I wonder if we will see that happen again soon. It won’t matter. As long as there is big money in buy votes, the voters will be slaves to that money.

Take Care,

Mike

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