.Friday Firesmith

Friday Firesmith – Fire!

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I always wondered why that Live Oak tree was still standing. The lean was pronounced, to say the least. But it stood for over two hundred years, and twenty since I’ve been here. Eleven inches of water in six hours brought the water level up higher than anyone had ever seen or imagined. I went out in my wading boots and could hear the Oak’s roots groaning and popping. By the time I got back inside and got the cell phone the tree fell with a splash.

That was 12 April 2023.

A likely young man who had no small amount of skill with a chainsaw helped me get the branches off the tree, we waded in waist deep water to get a lot of it into the woods, and at the end of two weeks, we had all but the main trunk hauled away.

The water level receded enough for me to burn the top branches, some of them thicker than my waist. Then the rain came back and forced me away.

A week or so ago I started burning again and this time the weather held and I’m making good progress. But a Live Oak that has been dead for two years is still not giving up the ghost that easily. Live Oak is a dense wood, and I started a fire on a Monday, and it burned until Saturday, in some form or another. I’m averaging about a foot off the tip of the tree per burn.

It takes a lot of fuel to do this, and I’m not willing to use gasoline or anything like that. I also don’t want a giant fire that can be seen from the space station. I have time. There’s no reason to make a mistake with this fire.

As odd as it may sound, the fire can still escape. Yes, it’s a foot away from a pond formed by the flooding. Yes, I have three outdoor faucets within range, and yes, keeping the fire burning hot enough for the Live Oak wood to burn has been an issue. But fire is a willful and hungry demon who calls no man her friend. I will neither turn my back on her nor will I allow weariness to pull me into some sense of security when the fire burns bright and hot.

I sit now, and wait until the wood dries from yesterday’s rain, and the mud isn’t as slick. I’m getting down to the trunk of the tree, thick and heavy. I’m thinking about drilling large holes in the trunk, some down and some sideways, and see what this brings when the fire digs deep. This is a time for experimentation as well as heat, as all things should be.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Garden 2025

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For years my garden was something I took pride in and grew great plants. The first garden here was smol, an old wheelbarrow and a large oak stump that had a hollow in the middle. They survived for a few years then I expanded, and grew tomatoes and peppers in a small plot. This, too, was expanded, and four years ago I decided to go big, and turned a chunk of my front yard into a miniature farm. Three growing seasons ago, I expanded again. Things went to hell on me

Heat got my garden three years ago, and only the peppers survived, and not all of them did. Two years ago, we had hurricanes that flooded the garden and killed everything. Last year, an eleven inch rain killed every plant I owned. Then the hurricanes came to rid me of the notions I was going to grow anything at all.

Weeds took over and I couldn’t be bothered with trying to keep the dead garden in shape. The back of the property was flooded, trees were dying and falling and there was no respite from the never endingrain.

Few weeks ago, I stood in front of the tangled mess that was a garden, a good garden, and I wondered how much work it would be to just get it cleared. Did I want to try again, really? I took the garden rake out and dug up a large weed that looked somewhat like an alien creature, and maybe it had drowned, too.

I smelled the dirt.

Garden dirt, when dirt is done right, smells different.

I know this dirt. Most of it came from the compost pile that is still under a foot of water. I hauled wagon loads to the garden to make the soil deeper, to give the garden a chance to have better root systems, and earthworms by the score tagged along.

The soil is good, made better by the coffee grounds I tossed in, and there I found some random piece of plastic, an ingredient I worked hard to rid the garden of for years. I pulled up a patch of grass, knocked the dirt off the roots and squeezed it in my hand. I made this dirt. Weather took my plants away, killed the tomatoes first, then the squash, and finally the okra and peppers, but the dirt is still here.

I sent my plant person a text and she send back, “I wondered where you were.” But the hurricanes ravaged her hot house. She has tomatoes, squash and okra, but no peppers. I stop by the next day, and she loads me up with plants, and back home, in the freshly cleared garden, I do what I have always done in the Spring. I start a garden.

Yeah, I’m oh for three in the last three seasons. Yeah, hurricanes are stronger and coming more frequently. But part of me that matters wants to grow stuff I can eat and share with my friends.

I’m back.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – TomAHtoes and Bullfrogs

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(I told you I would ~ MikeCo)

During the wee hours of the night, 12 April 2023, the rain began. The forecast called for hard rain, and they were right. I awoke as soon as it started because the sound of the rain on the roof was loud. I listened for a while, checked the clock, which read just after midnight, and waited for the rain to slack off. It didn’t. For six hours the rain came down in a hurry and we got eleven inches.

The next morning, the aftermath of the storm manifested with a giant Live Oak toppling over, and the driveway being underwater. My backyard flooded to a point I had never seen before. It was incredible in the magnitude of the amount of water.

Things didn’t get better over time.

2023 saw a couple of hurricanes come in close and add more water to the problem, and my garden drowned. 2024 saw even more hurricanes and even more water, and my garden drowned again.

2025 began wet, and a series of weekly rains kept the water level way too high.

March saw the water level down a bit. April has been a dry month, so far, and little by little, the water is receding. A few more feet and I’ll be able to burn what is left ofthe Live Oak that fell back in 2023.

Believe it or not, I had to don some wading boots to look for the water hose in what was once dry land but is now a small lake. I found the hose, fished it out, and watered my garden, which is in pretty much the highest ground on the property. There is just so much rain tomatoes and squash can handle before they die, however.

Over two years’ worth of flooding has brought in different species of both animals and plants. Frogs, of course, moved in from the pond that overflowed into the yard, and with the frogs came those things that feed on frogs. Water snakes, cottonmouths, wood storks, a great blue heron, a green heron, all followed the frogs. Ducks of all sorts, an egret or three, and assorted wading birds all came to visit.

A couple of alligators, small ones, have swam around in what once was where I mowed the back yard.

My compost pile, that turned out enough compost for me to fully stock the garden, is still under a foot of water. My fire pit is under at least four feet of water. And all of this is after the water started going down.

I mowed today, moving into the swamp grass and reeds, creating space to see what’s there and what’s still mud, and opening up the yard a little more for the dogs. I cut two meters wide into the very back, a meter and a half wide near the shed, and about a meter and a half path to the woods for the dogs to run freer. All the assorted grasses were half a meter tall, at least.

Now, with the swamp grass cut back, and not all the way, I can see that if the water recedes a few more feet, the ditch in the back of the yard will still be full, but within its banks. The compost pile will begin to emerge butbe useless for a while. The pond will begin the process of returning to where it has been for the last twenty-five years.

We’ll know this hurricane season is the new normal or if the old one holds sway.

I’d like to have some tomatoes to talk about this year, but I also love to see storks and herons. I love the sound of frogs. Love what you have, says I. The garden or the swamp, each has a draw that is undeniable.

Take Care,

Mike

In all the photos that you see this week, all the area that can be seen was once lawn, or at least mowable. The old shed you see has never been flooded like this before. Oh, and the hose? Got it out without a Kraken attacking me.

Friday Firesmith – Cats are universal conversation currency

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Cats are Universal Conversation Currency. If you have cats, or just a cat, you can talk feline with anyone else who has been a recipient, or a victim, of the Cat Distribution System. Aqaba Thomas, the Cat Unexpected, has a Urinary Tract Infection. I have asked for advice and gotten a lot of it, but I also took Aqaba to the vet. I love my cat people, but I trust in people who went to the University of Georgia to study animal medicine. The vet runs tests and confirms the UTI. But now I have to figure out how to get pills into the cat without trauma to the feline and blood loss to his owner.

Enter The Cat People!

Okay, first off, because they are my cat people, and cat people, like cats, never really belong to anyone, I get a lot of smart ass replies online that references full body armor, destroyed furniture, and blood. Lots of blood. Buckets of blood. There are eleventy billion “giving a cat a pill” meme, jokes, and that sort of thing.

All of them are accurate, but useless.

Yet there are those who have been in my paws before, and know I need help. Hid the pills in food, use the tube food as a treat hider, soak the pills in tuna oil, and the list grows. But this time it is accurate and it also works.

The first dose goes in through a syringe but it’s not pretty. The next dose goes in with scrambled eggs and is a success. But the cat treat in a tube hits the home run, and works twice in a row. The Cat People are there for me, and for Aqaba.

But it doesn’t stop there. I also get lessons in cat food that includes urinary health, I get a lecture of blockages and why I have to find out where he’s hiding his pee if he isn’t using his box, and I also get stories about long term effects and long-term answers.

Aqaba Thomas came in bloodied and terrified. The Cat People were down for that, andlet me know I did the right thing by leaving Aqaba in the trap on the trip to the vet’s. Rabies was unlikely, but not impossible, which was my thing, and The Cat People saw my caution as a sign of wisdom.

They also recommended I find Aqaba some sort of box to hide in and that I did, too, so he felt secure and hidden.

Whatever else may be, I have not faced being a new cat owner alone.

And so all the Cat People who were certain I would keep Aqaba were right. And now all of them are giving me advice, the vet agrees with.  Aqaba Thomas, through whatever device the Universe used to get him here, has found a home The Cat People approve of, and that is no small thing.

I discovered I speak fluent feline just by caring.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Missing Barbara Bach

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I’m not a musician, can’t read music, but play the radio proficiently. I pretty much can’t speak intelligently about the subject of music except I know what I like, and I feel it.

Years ago, I bought classical music CDs because they were cheap, and I was destitute. I also discovered I wrote better when writing under the influence of classical music.

I bought a boxed set of three CDs that had a wide variety of classical music on them for three bucks. This is how I met Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004, by Johann Sebastian Bach. Now, the listing on the CD was “Partita No.2” and I had no idea it was a solo violin piece, and one of the most difficult, and well written pieces, ever created by humankind.

I could, of course, tell it was beautiful, and as I would listen to it on my cheap CD player,I felt this piece of music deep inside my soul. Forgive me my inabilities in music, but I thought it was a duet. I could identify a violin, easily, but that was as far as my talents went.

One day, many years after falling in love with this piece of music, I heard it on NPR and they played the entire piece, all eighteen minutes or so, and then the announcer spoke as to how some thought Bach had written part of it, especially the last part, in memory of his wife, Barbara, who had died while he was composing the piece.

Monday, I took my truck to the shop for a minor adjustment they had failed to make while repairing it and was listening to this song and pulled over. The connection was finally made in my heart and mind. I originally thought this song was a duet, and perchance, I heard it this way because the composer had written it while missing his wife, the person who was the other half of his duet in life. It would be something masterfully done, expertly, exquisitely, and painfully beautiful.

Three hundred years later, I can still feel a man’s heart breaking, as he grieved for his wife through music.

Is there a song, or a piece of music out there that hits you hard?

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Three For One Used Books

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I’m not known as a man who is influenced quickly by things mystical, supernatural, or spiritual. Yet both writing and books hold over me a power I would not have them relinquish for anything in the Universe at large.

When I was in the Army, money was hard to come by, and new books were expensive. I knew my time in the military would be temporary when a sergeant told me, “You have too many books.” He told me I would be limited to owning five books.

However, the desert of books could be traveled through the oasis of Used Book Stores, which peppered various spots in nearly every small town in South Georgia. From my post in Hinesville, Georgia, to my hometown in Blakely, a few used bookstores could be found and break the monotony of the drive. Vidalia, a place known for sweet onions and UFOs, also had a small bookstore I discovered quite by accident and happily so.

Years before, a woman tried to get me to read, “Illusions” by Richard Bach, but I wasn’t into that sort of thing at the time, and was surprised a copy had fallen off a stack of books when I brushed against them. I replaced it, and it slipped off again. The price on it was three dollars and all I had was two. They sold it to me for two, and it’s been a regular in my bookshelf since then. Not that particular copy, mind you, for I will give books away quicker than keeping them. I release them into the wild, to spread joy and happiness. The books come to me in some manner or fashion, so I send them out again.

After getting out of the military, a small used book store was within walking distance of my apartment, and they would trade three for one on books. Another bookstore across town had a bargain bin full of used books for a quarter. So for seventy-five cents I could get a book from the walking distance bookstore.

I learned that people selling books at yard sales would surrender a box of books rather than keep them, and I could get books I wanted, or needed by trading them in. I would look in the local paper and map out the best route to take in my quest for more books from yard sales.

Sadly, I don’t read as much as I once did, and paper books are slowly going the way of the dinosaur. I’m listening to an audiobook right now, and like listening as I work out at the Y. It’s not the same, no, and I miss the long hours I would spend lying to myself about stopping at the next page, or chapter.

Today, as I write this, is the first of April, the birthday of science fiction and fantasy author Anne McCaffrey. She wrote “The Dragonriders of Pern” series and I got hooked on them. After the fifth or sixth book I burned out but I still remember looking for one of the books in the series and finally finding it. No matter what you do with a computer, nothing will ever match finding a good used book in a store that has a dog snoozing behind the counter as the owner reads a real book.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – The Rites of Ticks

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Early Warning, this essay has not been fact checked so it be interesting and funnier. I did my own research. I Googled until I found things that agreed with what I wanted.

I was bitten by a tick, removed it, then flushed it down the toilet, along with some of my blood. There was a case of a murderer who killed a woman in her apartment, and a tick was found with his DNA inside the bedroom where she was murdered. I can see a sweating defense attorney cross examining a tiny arachnid on the witness stand.

The flushed tick came up in a conversation and a friend told me ticks don’t drown. That led me to having a vision of my septic tank with a layer of writhing ticks at the bottom.

This led me to doing a Google search for how long ticks can go without food and one species has, so far, gone twenty-seven years. But their life span is three years in some cases. This is why fact checking this is problematic.

Up until three or four years ago, ticks were never a real problem here in this part of South Georgia, but now, I have to hose myself down with chemicals to work in the yard. The yard, not the woods, and it’s getting worse. The dogs and one cat are on preventives, but there are a lot of ticks out there right now.

At some point, millions of years from now, alien archaeologists are going to dig up my septic tank and discover a concrete pit with a thick layer of fossilized ticks at the bottom, buried in human waste. Why did ancient humans build these structures? Was it religious in nature? Why did they keep so many tiny bugs in these pits? Were these creatures pets? Was some ritual performed, and many of the members of the religion bound to bring one as a token of their spirituality? An alien describes to the others the ritual of blood, where members of the sect travel long distances, bring a small jar or bottle, containing the Holy Bug of Blood, and lovingly placing it into the pit with the millions of others, and then burying it. It would be regarded as a sign of piety for a human’s blood to be found in many pits, and the investigation would begin to discover if humans traveled long distances, and why some locations showed no sign of the ritual being performed at all. Did wars break out over this, and some places at odd with those who refused the ritual?

Or perhaps, humans kept their DNA in these creatures and buried them hoping they would gain immortality in some way. I can see the aliens now, scratching their heads, both of them, with all seven hands, wondering how the ticks got there.

And then one discovers a tick has survived and is attached to his fifth leg. The alien screams in horror.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – I don’t do traffic

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I was once on a double date, my friend Mark and his wife Sandy were in the front seat, Mark was driving, and I told him, “That guy in the other lane is coming over,” and Mark took his foot off the gas about the time the other car changed lanes and almost hit us.

Everyone was impressed but the truth is, I worked in traffic for most of my adult life and you get an idea of what drivers are going to do before they do it. Or you get hurt.

It’s not fool proof, because fools are getting more foolish by the day, and you can’t trust anything but a concrete barrier when it comes to stupid drivers.

I have seen some strange sh!t.

When a contractor hired someone new for flagging traffic, I would talk to them for a while, get to know them, and try to figure out if they were going to get killed, or get me killed. Flagging traffic does not take a lot of intelligence, but it cannot be done by anyone who isn’t smart enough to be afraid of traffic.

New Guy told me he was nervous, had a bad feeling about the work. It was a side road, not busy, and I told him just keep your eyes open and don’t turn your back on traffic. I was walking back to my truck when I heard the log truck lock his brakes down and the squeal of rubber on the road made my skin crawl.

New Guy ran.

Not just away from the scene, but down the street, to the nearest store, found a pay phone and called his wife to come get him. The skid marks were one hundred and nine feet long.

Had a guy pull a shotgun on a flagger one day and two cars behind him was a deputy, who was not amused. They got the driver for DUI and threatening someone with a gun. That flagger quit, too.

Ronnie and I were sitting on my tailgate on a Friday, eating breakfast and drinking coffee and it was the last day of the project. Ronnie didn’t do traffic control because he ran the tack truck, which sprayed hot tar out at 350 degrees onto the road so the asphalt would stick to it. But the next Monday Ronnie was trying to stop a semi as they unloaded their equipment and the truck hit him.

Someone called me and told me there had been an accident involving an asphalt crew and wanted to know if I was the project manager. I told them no, I had a crew that finished that Friday. They told me who the contractor was and I waited to find out who had been killed. It was Ronnie.

I stopped taking chances in traffic after I retired. All chances. Any chances. I won’t go to my mailbox if traffic is coming. I rarely pass anyone. I avoid Interstate.

I remember the guy that pulled up on a bridge we were building and asked if he could go on through. There was a seventy-foot-wide gap to the other side and a creek in the middle.

Idiots are getting dumber and I am getting slower. That’s why I don’t do traffic anymore.

Your favorite stupid driver story…..go!

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Aqaba Thomas lost and found

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Aqaba Thomas, when he wants to be picked up, will run right at me, as if being picked up and carried around, is an urgent thing. He’s not allowed on the table, but if I pick him up he won’t be on the table, that message is clear, isn’t it? I bend over at the waist, he gets two paws on my right shoulder, and I lift, catching both his back paws in my left hand. We’ve done this before, he and I, and he knows to keep the claws in, knows I got him, and knows he gets picked up and carried around.

Some of this is heat. It’s early in the morning and he wants me to hold him close so he can be warm. Aqaba Thomas, the Cat Unexpected, leans in hard, and purrs.

Some of this is he wants me to carry him around to the windows, so he can see out while he’s being carried around. The back deck is nice, and he likes looking, the bedroom window shows the yard, but what he really likes is the front door. He likes to look out of the front door and see the porch. I turn my body, blocking his view and he bats me lightly with a front paw. I turn so he can see and he wiggles a bit, yes, right there. The body language is subtle, but Aqaba has trained me well.

He looks down at the porch at the spot it began. His first food bowl was there, and the water bowl, too. He was at eight pounds when he came in, and is at thirteen now. He was lighter when I started feeding him on the porch, and he would stop, look up at me, inside the house watching, and that is how we met. He knew who I was, and knew I was feeding him. That’s how it begins in cases like this. “Hi! I’m Mike and I’ll be taking care of you today.”

Aqaba remembers this spot. This was the beginning of home. He likes being here, at this spot, with me. I’ll hold him until he wiggles a bit, a sign to move on, and he purrs all the while.

He rubs faces with me before I put him back in the cat tree. This, too, is how we do it. It’s his way of showing he appreciates the ride, the warmth, and the moment. This is his way of saying he remembers what was, but this is what is.

The connection between an animal and the person who rescued him is undeniable and runs deep. Aqaba Thomas remembers being lost, and cannot forget being found.

Take Care,

Mike