.Friday Firesmith

Friday Firesmith – three months to the day

by

Three months to the day, 23 September, my little sister died of cancer. In her will, she left me her car, which used to be Mom’s car, and now it’s back. We pulled into her driveway about two thirty and the car was there, keys in it, so we looked it over and left.

My sister was a smoker and she had an ashtray in the car full of butts, so I rode with the windows down until we reached Bainbridge, forty miles away, put some gas in the car and threw the ashtray away. I found two Taylor Swift CDs in the car, but everything else was twangy as hell.

I drive a stick shift so finding someone to ride with me then drive back in my truck required finding someone who likes me enough to spend two and a half hours in a truck with me then back alone. I have a writer friend I can count on and she drives a stick.

We talk about writing, her project, mine, writing in general, and my sister was an artist who never really committed to the idea she had talent, and she did.

In a prefect world, I would have spent the day driving around Early County, remembering the places my sister and I would drive around while drinking, and yeah, that was once socially acceptable. We would creep slowly down the red clay road and toss the bottles out of the windows and no one ever got pulled over for drinking and driving unless they were causing a problem. Fewer cars, fewer people, fewer paved roads, and fewer problems.

I never knew it until she died, but my sister was a unifying force in the family, a peace maker, and she was always the little one, the youngest, and that was part of an issue I never realized existed until she was older. We never treated her like a full formed adult sometimes.

She had been with the same boyfriend for eight years, and he died five years ago, but I don’t think she ever got past that. She never dated again. Never wanted to, and for the first time in her life, my sister lived alone. I never thought she would survive that, but she discovered comfort in isolation, which I grok. She told me she knew why I lived alone for so long, and she stopped being so afraid of the dark. She lived with cats and a large black lab type dog, and was handy with a shotgun.

This might be my last trip back to Early County ever. My best friend died in 2013, of cancer, my sister has died of cancer now, and to go back is to haunt my own life, even though I am still alive. I no longer have any old friends to visit there, no one from high school to pal around with, and honestly, I have always hated Blakely Georgia.

As I drove back, windows down, Taylor Swift on a CD, and feeling emotionally drained, I remember the last time I spoke with my sister, knowing it would likely be the last time. In the car was her music, her detritus of life, change in a small cup, a few ones tucked away, paid bills on the floor, unopened mail, and now, she is no more. Three months to the day.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Bringing down the trees

by

The last two trees I brought down were a bit goofy and that made me a bit skittish. The first one did something not totally unexpected, because when you cut a tree that is both dead and hollow, it might, or it might not, do what you plan it will.

Hear me, My Dudes. When you’re felling a tree and that thing starts moving, you do, too. Get the hell away from it. This one hit, then the trunk end backed up over ten feet and it fell over due east another five feet. Standing to one side or right behind it, I would have gotten hit.

Another I cut two weeks ago broke as it was falling and it was more of an explosion than a cut. Part of the top fell backwards. I ran, twisted my ankle, and decided to shop around for a tree cutting service.

So here we are. The guy told me he would take the two smaller dead trees, with twisted limbs going off in all directions, and the dying tree next to The Mom’s She Shed for four-fifty. I think he was in a good mood, for that is a great price, and yesterday, the bucket truck and the saw guy arrived on time and ready to go.

The dead pine is lopped into pieces and dropped without a hitch. The dead water oak is dispatched quite easily, and all is well.

The tree beside the Shed of the She, is a mystery tree. I have been told it’s a water gum, a swamp myrtle, and a copperhead. (Everything is a copperhead to some people.)

So the guy buckets up, limbs fall like rain, he gets a lot of it down, and decides to fell the rest. I warn him about the water faucet in the backyard. He tells me no problem.

He ties the a rope to a tree, uses another rope to fasten a pulley to a tree in the woods, backs the truck up to create tension, and cuts. The tree falls. It does not fall perfect.

It misses my yard wagon by a foot. But the rope pushes another dead tree over and it hits the faucet perfectly. Water springs out like a sprinkler on meth. The guy has no plumbing supplies with him.

Normally, I might be pissed, but this guy has taken down three trees and no one is hurt. I have some spare parts and some glue, so the two of us get the pipe fixed, he cuts some of the larger pieces down to size for me, and we call it a day.

I could have folded my arms, told him the broke pipe was his problem, and simply waited to see what would happen next. But it was a freak accident, unrelated to the actual cutting, and I have three trees down and no one is hurt.

I’ve said that before. No one is hurt.

I think that’s more important that some glue and spare pipe parts and fifteen minutes of work.

Take Care,

Mike

friday firesmith – work related illness

by

The longer I am retired, the more I realize how unhappy my job made me. I know a guy that spent five years in prison. He said there were milestones while he was in, one year, two years, and he could count the days he had left before he was eligible for parole.

But the day-to-day grind wore him down. Each day was identical to the last, and nothing ever changed. He stayed away from trouble, never spoke to anyone but his cellmate, and worked hard to be invisible. He rarely left his cell and when he came up for parole, sitting in a room that wasn’t a cell in front of people who were not prisoners was more than a little frightening.

After all, it had been five years since he had seen daylight for more than a few minutes at a time, and it had been five years since he was able to do anything at all without walls around him.

Released into a halfway house, he got a job, worked hard, then returned to the halfway house and hung around with his fellow ex-convicts. When he was finally released from this part of the journey, he moved in with his parents, moved into his old room he had when he was a kid, and started life over again.

That’s what being retired is like. You’re accustomed to living your life a certain way, and then one day it’s gone. Of course, it feels like a vacation at first, but you start to drift away from that life you lived, and you lose track of people you knew at work. It’s coming up on six years for me now. Suddenly, it seems, six years.

My friend who did time, it’s been five years for him. He says it’s like he wasn’t there at all now. None of the people who knew him before talk about it, and no one in his new job knows, or at least they pretend they don’t.

Odd thing, the one thing we share is we both went through a lot of physical health problems right after. Both were digestive issues. Both of us found freedom, but at the same time, the fact we both were in a very restrictive relationship with our time, having time suddenly was overwhelming.

Physically and emotionally, any sort of dramatic change in lifestyle takes a toll, even if that change is positive. For twenty-seven years I rose and went to bed guided mostly by the idea I had to, had to, go to work. It’s what I had been trained to do by my parents, by school, by the bills that needed to be paid, and by the fact everyone else was doing it, too.

Work devoured my life and became a prison. I put off family functions, girlfriend’s lives, my own life, and countless other events and occasions because of work. Work became a mental illness of sorts, a vast blanket under which I hid from living.

And suddenly, I am alive.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Summer and September

by

As a teenager, I worked in the fields during the summer, and heat was never an issue. After working under the sun for a month, all heat feels the same, all humidity is normal, sweat is the uniform of the day, and sundown is quitting time.

This prepared me for working on the road, in triple digit heat, with asphalt that’stwo hundred fifty degrees as it comes out of the spreader. Get close enough to the asphalt and even the gnats will leave you alone.

Working on bridges usually meant there was water, but those structures that spanned overflows or just large holes that sometimes heldwater, it was like being in the bottom of a well with a heat lamp positioned over it.

Heat in South Georgia, for the better part of my life, simply was.

September is here, and last year it didn’t cool off for most of the month. This year, the first days of September have gifted us with temperatures in the mid to upper sixties, and it is heaven.

I did some limb cutting to get debris away from the fence the Big Pine fell on. And then I had to replace the fence. I started early in the morning and worked until noon. The heat nearly got me. The first part of August is unkind, to say the least, and at sixty-five, I feel my age more and more the higher the temperature rises.

Through the years, the new hires got younger and younger, and softer and softer. The generations raised on the inside of houses, nestled comfortably with their screens and air conditioning, were not accustomed to working outside in the heat, and some could not. Some would not. Management began allowing employees to sit in their truck with AC and cell phones, while work went unobserved. Being out there in the heat with the work was the only way to learn how its done, but the younger generation wanted only to stay out of the heat.

In good truth, theywere never trained to endure. I’ve watched grown men in their early twenties panic when they’ve been in the heat for too long. I’ve had employees quit rather than sweat. I’ve seen men who claimed they’ve played football in high school go home from work because they were too hot.

I went a few months without a work truck at one point. I had someone drop me off at the asphalt plant with my lunch cooler, I would catch the first truck out at six in the morning, then catch the last truck back in at seven in the evening. Someone would pick me up and take me back to the office, and by the time I got home I had time to eat supper, take a shower, and go to bed.

They forgot me one night, and I had to walk to a payphone and call for a ride to come get me. The guy that forgot me had gone out drinking so when he finally arrived he was almost too drunk to drive. After that incident, they got me a truck. It had a hole in the floorboard and didn’t have air conditioning. But it was a ride.

September. Cool breezes and nice sunrises. And the memories of summer, easing into the past again.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Storm Damage and stuff

by

The back of the property is finally dry enough for me to reclaim my Compost Pile Complex, yet only the original pile is going to be used for a while. I’ve got some work to do back there. Let’s so a quick recap of why this conversation is taking place.

12 April 2023. A freak rain event drops eleven inches of rain in six hours on top of a small part of Brooks County Georgia, resulting in the pond overflowing, my backyard flooding, and the compost pile being submerged. I lose a giant Live Oak in the backyard due to its roots being submerged and it falling over. A wet summer follows.

20 August 2023. Hurricane Idalia comes ashore and brings us some wind and rain. Some smaller trees are knocked over, limbs fall in the flooded area and that’s where they will stay for a while.

26 September 2024. Hurricane Helene comes ashore and we take a direct hit with maximum winds of 128 mph recorded in Brooks County. More rain, more downed trees in the back, and one big Water Oak on the west side of my two acres is broken near the ground and pushed due west. It had been leaning due east. The flood water in my backyard nearly reaches the deck. My shed, which is three feet off the ground, is six inches away from being flooded.

20 January 2025. A foot of snow falls in South Georgia. It’s pretty. But it’s also made of water and it does not help at all. The giant Pine Tree in the backyard dies from its root system being submerged. It’s seventy-five feet tall. I take it down with a chainsaw and more than a few tears.

The water hangs around until we start having drier weather in the first part of 2025. April and May see only a few inches of water, and as the water recedes, I start moving stuff out of the yard.

By June of 2025, the water is almost all gone and by July, I’m back into the Compost Pile.

The hibernaculum started before the flooding and got bigger once the Live Oak fell. I set fire to it one time, when the water was high and got some cool photos of it. I also took the kayak out and paddled around, even over the compost pile.

But now, it’s a wasteland out there for trees. Many, many, many have died, from being pushed over or for being drowned. Quite a few are leaning on other trees and will eventually fall. I can either let nature takes it course and hope they fall well and not on a dog, or I can take them down.

One thing is for certain is I won’t live long enough to see the trees return. The First Tree, the tree that caught my attention by being the first free to grow in the Fire Pit Area is dead. For years, the back part of the property was overgrown with vines, and when I cleared them out, the trees returned. That was twenty-five years ago. A lot of my work in growing trees has been erased now, and I will not get another chance.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Hurricane Season 2025

by

Back when I was a kid, we all went to the Smith’s house when a hurricane came through South Georgia. It rained hard, the wind blew, but the adults wouldn’t let us look out of the windows at all. The lights flickered and did not go out. It was boring.

A hurricane came through Valdosta Georgia back in 1985 or 86, and because I was renting an apartment I didn’t care. I walked to the store to get some beer and realized drinking while being outside wasn’t a good idea, and for that matter, being outside was a bad idea. It was fun, kinda, to lean into the wind like I could.

I was sent to Mississippi in 2005, on the heels of Katrina, and that was life altering. I got there right after the power came on, and the people who owned motels and hotels reserved some rooms for people doing damage assessments so I never slept on a floor or in my truck. I met people who had lost everything, with no way of finding out if their families had survived, or if everyone else was dead. I went to a place where the smell of death filled the air.

Michael just missed us in 2018, but hammered my sister’s place and hometown of Blakely, Georgia. Then in 2023, Idalia hit and flooded my property, which killed many trees. In an odd way, I think that hurricane helped convince Aqaba that living inside was better than not. But by last year, when Helene hammered us, Aqaba was an inside cat.

Helene was the first, and the last, major hurricane I rode out. I had plans to evacuate, rented rooms, had a place to board the animals, and everything was set. Helene’s predicted track shifted west, I cancelled reservations, then she moved back to the east, hard. It was too late to find a place to run.

The storm passed directly over my house at about one in the morning. For about four hours all I could hear was wind and rain. At one point, it was so dark I started hallucinating colors. The wind rode in through the woods like waves at the beach, getting louder and louder, then receding, with the crack of  murdered trees punctuating the sounds. I lay in bed, fully clothed with my shoes on, waiting for the roof to go, or for a tree to come down on the house.

            At one point I was pretty sure I had made a serious mistake in judgement (I had) and was going to pay for it (I didn’t) but once the wind speed hit one hundred thirty eight there was nothing to do but lie there and wait. T’was a long night.

Right now, Erin is still in the Atlantic, heading north with two other systems cranking up. I enter the teeth of the 2025 Hurricane Season having rode out a high CAT 3 Hurricane. I will not do that again. Ever.

Whatever comes out of the ocean this year, I am running from it.

Take Care,

Mike

friday firesmith – A tale of Greg

by

Greg and I were friends in high school. Several things about Greg were strange, but after all, he was a drummer in a band. I dated a woman who had known him most of his life, and was good friends with his family, and she thought Greg was a little odd, but so where most of her friends.

I was the best man at his wedding. His new bride was eighteen, he was twenty-four, and they seemed to be a happy couple. Two years later she left him.

Greg started dating a woman older than he was, and she had a twelve year old daughter. They went on vacation and Greg’s beach photos were mostly of the little girl in her swimsuit. I began to feel uneasy about Greg and the girl, but shortly after the beach trip, her mother broke up with him and left.

When I left the Army I moved to Valdosta Georgia and Greg had disappeared. A few years later he called me looking for a character witness in a trial. It seems that a computer virus had infected his computer and downloaded a lot of child porn. I told Greg I was the last person he wanted in that courtroom. If summoned I would have told the truth.

He had called a mutual friend and that friend called me, and we began to compare notes. Greg never had a girlfriend in high school, never dated, and his wife, Kim, looked a lot younger than eighteen. The photos of his girlfriend’s daughter made us stop and wonder. There was only one conclusion to come to about Greg. He was a pedophile. All the clues had always been there, but we, and everyone else, never put them together.

Last I heard, Greg had served five years in a prison in West Virginia on the child porn charge. Where he is now, I have no idea.

Greg and I were good friends. We drank together, we talked a lot about music and life. I was a roadie once for a gig he played at a Country Club where a woman got on stage and stripped. We went to concerts, the beach, and hung out a lot. I wore my dress green uniform at the wedding and somewhere there’s photos of us together. Greg and I were close.

Child Porn is a red line for me with Greg or anyone else. Sexualizing children is abhorrent. I was more than willing to disregard the good times years of friendship in order to preserve my own values. I would do the same with anyone I have ever known.

I will, without hesitation or regret, cut ties with anyone who has anything to do with sexualizing children. There is no acceptable degree.

Take Care,

Mike

friday Firesmith – Eighty Years Later: The Bomb and The Surrender

by

Contrary to one of the many myths that surround the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August of 1945, none of the aircrew of either plane committed suicide or became insane after the bombing.

In 1985, a navigator on one of the planes that accompanied the bomber that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki did commit suicide, and was despondent over health issues he had, as well as the bomb.

The dropping of the two bombs might have, or might not have, convinced the Japanese to surrender. The Russian invasion of Manchuria, in fact, was a greater cause for concern to the Japanese than the two atomic bombs. Japanese troops deserted en masse in front of the Soviet Army, which was well trained, well equipped, and had the element of surprise on their side.

Also, in the Battle of Okinawa, which ended in June of 1945, almost 8,000 Japanese troops surrendered. While a small fraction of the up to 100,000 soldiers on the island, many believed the Imperial Japanese Army could see defeat as inevitable.

On August the 6th, a bombing raid destroyed the last functioning oil refinery in Japan, reducing their ability to produce fuels of any kind to zero. They imported 100% of their crude oil, and American submarine actions had reduced imports to 1% of their capacity in 1941.

The Battle of Okinawa, saw the first massive use of kamikazes against the Allied Fleet. The Japanese hoped enough ships would be hit, and sunk, to dissuade an invasion of the Japanese home islands. But the kamikazes, even when they did strike a ship, rarely did enough damage to sink that ship. American naval vessels in particular were heavily armed with antiaircraft batteries. Moreover, American ships were built to take a lot of damage before sinking, and American damage control teams were superb in both putting out fires, and repairing the damage done to their ships. Earlier in the war, the USS Yorktown was thought to be sunk twice by the Japanese before being torpedoed at Midway. The damage control teams on the Yorktown kept that boat afloat after taking damage the Japanese were certain would sink her.

In August of 1945, eighty years ago this month, the Japanese Empire was turning to dust. The Soviets were in China, the Chinese were getting stronger, the Allied Fleet was unstoppable, the American Air raids using incendiaries were killing hundreds of thousands of people, there was no oil, and then atomic bombs were dropped on two cities.

Would the Japanese have surrendered if the A Bombs had not been dropped?

Yes, I think they would have. The idea of letting the United States Marie Corp land in Japan and wreakthe havoc upon the Japanese homeland that they had in some many other places had to give the emperor pause. The Marines and American Army had thousands of veterans while the Japanese had very few.

As the battleship Yamato slipped under the sea in April 1945, the dreams of Japanese Empire went with it. I think the Japanese would have surrendered in August of 1945, simply because anything short of that would have meant the end of their entire culture.

Yes or no? Do you think The Bomb pushed them over the edge or was The Reason?

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – A Study in Common Scents

by

Okay, I get it, the gym is a place where the people are, at a minimum, motivated enough to go someplace they can put the effort into being in better shape. It would be nice to attract someone in a gym, and start something wonderful, have kids, and live happily ever afteruntil one of you dies alone, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Also, the gym is a place to get sweaty about staying in shape. If you’re like me, you go in to get a good workout and to do that you have to put some effort into it. If I’m going to get on a treadmill and run, then when I stop, I want to feel it.

I hope, in the end, all of this makes scents to you.

First, let us address those who are using the gym as a brick-and-mortar dating app. Men, there is a very good reason most quality gyms have a section devoted as a “Women Only” area, enclosed, with a locked door, and opaque windows.

You are that reason.

If you’re looking to strike up a conversation with a woman at the gyn, find the woman who is sitting on a piece of equipment, and has been for an hour, listening to music, looking bored and waiting for something to happen.

Women, if you’re going to sit on a piece of equipment, and you have been for an hour, listening to music, looking bored, and waiting for something to happen, do not wear perfume that comes packaged in a pump handled bug sprayer.

Yesterday, I walked by a woman in the gym that had been baptized in something that smelled like patchouli-based plutonium. My eyes literally teared up. Two thingshere, flower child. One, any man who can stand within a couple of feet of you has lost his sense of smell. Two, whatever you’re trying to cover up, if it’s that bad, seek medical help.

Men, if you’re going to go to a gym, stop and have a moment with the idea of showers. Most gyms have them. They have water. They have soap. There is a reason they have showers in gyms.

You are that reason.

There’s a difference between the smell of a human being who has worked out for an hour and dripping with sweat as opposed to the smell of a human being who does not shower on a regular basis.

The difference is the same as that between riding by a farm and enjoying the scent of freshly cut hay, and falling down in the middle of a pig stockyard and having to crawl out.

Women, the same gender who will bathe in perfume, universally will also shower on a regular basis. I’ve never been in the gym I go to and had a woman walk by and nearly gag me because she hasn’t showered since Ford was president. (Yes, there was a President Ford but no one remembers him.) Men are more likely to smell like they just escaped from a prison in that pig stockyard I mentioned earlier.

In closing, you ought to smell like a human being, not a flower.  Also, you ought to smell like a human being who showers more often than a solar eclipse occurs.

Take Care, and Take Showers,

Mike

Friday FireSmith – I saw a Cat

by

I know where I was on August the 25th, 2023, because I have a photo. Not of me, not at all, no. I got a partial photo of a cat. Grey, striped, with a white shoulder, it ran away as I drove down the driveway, and for reasons I cannot explain, I snapped a photo.

I called my neighbors and they, too, saw this cat, but it ran away from them. A stray, a feral, it really didn’t matter at all for nothing small and helpless is going to survive out here. Coyotes, bobcats, owls, hawks, venomous snakes, alligators, foxes, and humans with guns who might think a bullet is a mercy for a stray all live here. Starvation, if it lived, parasites, heat, and a host of stinging insects awaited this animal until something killed it.

            There was no way I could take a cat it. Wrex Wyatt had a dislike for small mammals.

Several days later I looked out of the front door window and there was this cat, walking up my mama’s wheelchair ramp as if it meant to simply walk right through the front door. I opened the door and the cat fled. I was too shocked to get a photo, but I did start putting out food, and the food began to disappear.

            I’ve been hungry. Not just simply wanting to eat, but not having food and not knowing where food was going to come from, or when. Whatever else may be true, no animal I can get food to is going to feel that.

            For reasons I won’t not try to explain at the moment, I started calling this cat, “Aqaba.”

Pronounced Ack-a-baa. I would go out on the porch with the bowl of food and sing out, “Aqaba! Aqaba! Kitty, kitty, kitty!” and put the bowl down.

            A week later, I could see him hiding in the woods near the house and when I called he came out, a little bit, and then stopped.

            Eventually, he made his way into the garden to wait. One day I called him and he came running out of the woods and stopped in the garden, and watched me, and crept a little closer.

            And this was as far as Aqaba would get. I talked to him, sang to him, kept food and water out, but there was a line this kitty was not crossing.

            The last week of August I began setting live traps for Aqaba, but he wanted to part of them at all, and refused to go in. On August the 30th, hurricane Adalia slammed into South Georgia, creating more flooded areas and knocking down trees. The power went out. Somewhere in the woods, Aqaba Thomas, the Cat Unexpected, had either lived or died. I set out food for a couple of days and sang for him. The food was untouched. I waited. There was no sign of Aqaba at all.

Take Care,

Mike