.Friday Firesmith

Friday Firesmith – Summer of 2025

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It’s with great difficulty I come to terms this summer is less than a week old. My plants

are dying from the heat. That’s the bad news. The good news is the water from the previous two

years is finally drying up. The pond is going with it. That would be the body of water that for the

last twenty-five years has been a body of weeds.

All over America the heat is rising. Roads are buckling under the heat, and Interstates are

closing due. They’ll have to do the repairs at night I imagine. I spent twenty-seven years doing

bridge and highway work, and it’s brutal in this sort of weather to try to work.

In 1997, we hit a spell where it was brutally hot but this was in August. They sent a

nineteen-year-old new hire out to learn a few things from me, and the first thing he learned was

we were not going to sit in the truck. We had shit to do.

This guy had poked fun at me for a while for being “old.”

He bragged he could put up with the heat much longer than I could, and when I got out of

the truck, and took the keys with me, he wasn’t daunted. After about an hour he had drank all the

water he brought with him. He was sweating, but still not giving in. About an hour later, he

wanted to sit in the truck and cool off. I told him he had to do ten pushups for every minute he

spent sitting in the AC. I did fifty. I told him I was going to check on a few things and I would be

back soon. I walked away. He freaked out.

An hour later he was in full panic mode. Three hours in direct sunlight next to an asphalt

operation and he was wilting. He wanted to call someone in the office to come get him but cell

phones hadn’t taken over the world yet. He tried to get the contractor to let him sit in his truck

and no.

Red faced and not sweating anymore, I was getting worried about him. He told me he

quit and wanted me to take him in. I dropped him off at a pay phone and waited until I was sure

someone was on the way. He looked bad.

When I got back the asphalt crew had quit. Not finished for the day, but mutinied. Out of

twelve men, ten of them had gotten into the work van and left. It was three in the afternoon. I

stopped by a bridge project and got into the water with my work clothes on. Spring Creek is cold

and clear and I soaked for a while.

The young man went back to the office and told them I was horrible and had tortured

him. When I got back, clothes already drying, I told them he had quit, and refused to work. They

didn’t so much as slap his wrist. Later, I found out the actual temperature was over 100 degrees

and the heat index over 110.

They don’t make teenagers like they used to. But the heat is getting worse every summer.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – The Destination is not the journey

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We were on the road a little past dawn, headed straight into my past.

I spent the first part of my life in Sowega, and you’d have to be from there to know what it means. Southwest Georgia. So now you’re a native. I also spent a great deal of time working on roads and bridges, so I know places no one else does. Sikes Mill was a quiet place, the Orange Spider Massacre happened there. Wolf Creek was nearby, and I spent a day there once, preparing for an in-house exam.

The turn on County Line Road in Thomas County was where I took to go to a friend’s house, and I’ve never been to Whigham’s main attraction.

I have reached Climax, which is nearby, and sang an Elton John song on Alice Street in Bainbridge.

Heading north from Bainbridge, I saw the house, once a nice house in a nice yard, and now the house is abandoned and the yard a sea of weeds. I met a woman who wanted a ride home so I took her there, we spent some time together, and then none. I remember a lot of weird things in Colquitt, like the man who got a DUI on a riding mower right in front of our paving crew. We had seen him riding past before, and once he turned it over in a ditch so we helped him out. He didn’t spill any of his beer.

A man had a mountain in his yard there, and someone offered to move it and couldn’t.

Steve, a guy I worked with, lost a sheet of paper by the road one day, work related paperwork, and asked me to help him look for it a week later. We went out, stopped, and he walked three feet and found it.

The cypress stump, seven feet across that guarded a well is gone now, the new road ate it.

The guy that lived in a trailer near the road was killed with his brother and three other people in a car wreck in 1980. The trailer is gone now. The hotel I took a woman to in 1982 is still there, and I remember how nervous she was to be in a hotel. She and I were both young, and she had never had sex except in the back of a car or two.

The golf course is a hay field again, and the country club closed, apparently.

New road work done long after I was gone confused the landscape, got rid of a lot of dirt roads, and obliterated landmarks, like the old building where a hamburger place stood. We went there when I was a little kid.

There’s a bypass, and I don’t have to drive through Blakely, where ghosts line up like roadkill on every corner. I don’t have to drive by the house I always thought of as a prison. I don’t have to travel this road but once or twice more in my life, and eventually, I, too, will be forgotten.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – From Russia with love

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Back a few years ago, one of my sister’s friends paid a woman from Russia to move to South Georgia and marry him. He knew what he was getting into, but the woman was drop dead gorgeous. Six feet tall, natural blonde hair, well built, and perfectly willing to give the man what he paid for, she stayed until she got her green card then away she went. The guy said it was the best six months of his life. He’s still living in a single wide trailer behind his parents’ house.She’s running an Only Fans site at fifty bucks per month.

There for years I would get messages from very pretty, and very young, Russian women looking for an American husband. Having a small bank account and an even smaller set of social skills, none of these blue eyed beauties ever gained much ground with me. The older I got the less I was interested in blowing my life’s savings to rent a wife until the paperwork cleared.

Then suddenly, AI appeared on the scene.

Now, I’m getting well crafted messages from women who are perfect in every possible way. Articulate and graceful, they are clearly not from Russia ( or any other country for that matter) and they seem to be totally immersed in all the things I like.

One really strange thing about AI women is their distance between their belly buttons and their nether regions seems to be disproportional. Their arms seem to be too long sometimes, too. Their faces are perfect. Perfectly perfect in such a way that the uncanny valley effect kicks in.

When they ask, “How are you today?” I usually respond with, “A shark bit my leg off.”

There is a pause, and they say, “I hope you are well.”

The mail order brides that were once so common are still there, to be sure. But the thing now seems to be getting a guy talking to a computer with good visuals, and luring him into a sexual relationship that can only be described as handy. And it is working. “Build your own girlfriend”  sites allow you to adjust the woman you want to any specifications. Some allow you to upload a photo so you can get your ex back. I don’t even want to speculate on that one.

I did connect with a woman from Russia, and she was blonde, blue eyed, and she was looking for a way out of that country. But she realized I wasn’t going to marry her, so we had a years long conversation about life here versus life there.

She told me she went out to eastern Russia, where a cave existed with petroglyphs carved into the stone. As she took photos and made sketches of the markings, a bear walked out of the woods and watched her. She knew better than to run, so she kept working and eventually the bear walked away.

Honestly, listening to her talk about that drew me in closer than anything else she ever did.

Take Care,

Mike

friday firesmith – Russia’s burning bombers

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We may never know how many bombers Russia actually lost but from the video footage the answer is certainly, “Plenty.”

Putin has to punish someone inside his security system for this and will. He also must wonder how in the name of Stalin were the drones delivered to the target site, and how long was this planned.

Who, Putin must wonder, planned this?  NATO? The Ukrainians?

Why,Putin must wonder, why did they plan this? One war or the next war?

First Strike Capability is wounded, severely, and retaliatory strikes will be weaker.

Surely, Putin must think, NATO would not invade now, just because Russian defensive capability is diminished.

The Germans and Poles line up on the west, the Finns are a long car drive from Moscow, and NATO comes in from the Ukraine.

Know what’s more difficult than beating American intel being used by Ukraine? How about an American armor division heading to the Crimea backed up by the US Navy using that same species of intel.

And if Putin is as smart as he thinks he is, now, at this very moment, he cannot afford to worry about what he thinks NATO might do, oh no, for now he has to worry about what they are capable of doing.

If they can, is that something Putin will ignore?

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Intelligence seems to be flawless. Perfectly flawless, in fact.

And the Russian military has no way of replacing the bombers for quite some time.

The world of Vladamir Putin just got rattled, hard. Now, he must think of a way to save face, to make sure his security people are punished, make sure there isn’t another box of yellow jackets waiting near his oil fields, and oh by the way, he’s in a war with Ukraine.

President Putin might be on the way out. I could see that happening. What he must do as opposed to what he’s going to do might not look exactly similar.

But I think if there’s more attacks deep, very deep, in Russian territory, Putin is done.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – the raccoon apocalypse tree

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When a raccoon hid in the hollow of a tree in 2016, Marco and Greyson, my sister’s dogs, lost their damn minds. Having a great deal of Black Lab in them, they were hunting dogs and as such, wanted to hunt the raccoon. The raccoon was not amusedand not coming out to play. I dragged the dogs away and the raccoon slipped out and was gone.

The Cousins dogs were returned to my sister back in 2019. The rain came in 2023 and flooded the back of the property.That tree sat in water for nearly two years and finally died.

Yesterday, the 27th of May, I finally took the tree down with a chainsaw, and as always, using a chainsaw can be an adventure.

Dead and hollow, like my dreams of finding romance at my age, the tree offered me an opportunity to watch the trunk splinter and crack, possibly falling apart, and maybe even falling in a direction I could not predict. Videos of this sort of thing are terrifying for those of us who use chainsaws.

I cut the notch and was happy. The notch did not get into the hollow yet looked deep enough to guide the fall in the right direction. As I began the main cut into the truck, opposite the notch, the cutting was easy, too easy, as the hollow offered no resistance. I stopped and drove in two wedges, to keep the tree from settling back on the saw, and to ease it in the direction I wanted it to fall. I cut a few inches more and the wedges began to vibrate. This meant they were loose and the tree was leaning in the right direction. I started cutting again and as soon as the wedges fell out, away I went, saw in hand. The tree began a perfect fall.

And perfect was this all. Then the falling tree caught on the limbs of another tree that had died. For a brief moment in time I looked on and thought to myself, yeah, it can just stay there. I aimed for the woods, the woods I hit, and… then the tree branches holding the felled tree all started snapping. The fell tree began falling again, but the branches that held it up also changed its momentum. The tree kicked back, about ten feet, and had I been standing where I had been cutting this would be a much more interesting story, or last week really would have been the last week. Back ten feet, over three, and it almost got my metal wagon.

When you cut a tree, and it starts falling, you better be moving. Move as far away as you think you should and add ten feet.

Imagine the butt end of that tree hitting you.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Fred and Rose West

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If you’ve never heard of Fred and Rose West, they’re the British couple who murdered at least a dozen people in England back in the late 1900s. There’s an interesting Netflix series on it, three episodes, and you have to wonder how they managed to kill for so long without getting caught.

Couples who are serial killers are rare. Sexual depravity among serial killers is not only common but almost universal. Ted Bundy was the first American serial killer to be loved by the press, and therefore the public, but Bundy’s behavior was sanitized by the press. Even as news stories talked about his soaring intelligence (which wasn’t true) and his ability to charm women (which was overplayed) they left out the necrophilia and cannibalism. Bundy’s undoing may have been an odd form of suicide for he wandered down to Florida and murdered a twelve year old girl. Florida will execute someone for that sort of thing, and Bundy knew it.

Fred West denied his wife, Rose, had anything to do with the murders, and for years they both said he was the sole murderer. She was a prostitute operating out of their home, and Fred liked watching.

While Fred was in prison for a short while, his daughter from a previous marriage was murdered but the body was not found for over twenty years. Fred led them to where the body was hidden, and this is where the story gets even stranger than ever before.

The ten or so women who were murdered, and Fred West confessed to all of the murders, was one thing. But the murder of the eight year old daughter of Fred West and his ex-wife, was pinned on Rose.

No confession, no murder weapon, no cause of death, no witnesses, and no evidence of time of death, yet Rose West was convicted of this murder and nine others. Fred had conveniently committed suicide in prison before the trial.

Do I think Rose was involved in the murders? At the very minimum she had to know about them. The one victim who escaped claimed Rose was a willing partner to rape and attempted murder. Yet that is one witness who did not come forward for over twenty years. No other evidence exists. The bodies buried in their cellar and under their patio speaks to at least one person in the house knowing what happened, and Fred West confessed to all the murders. Both he and Rose said she had nothing to do with it.

In an American court of law, Rose either walks free or gets out on appeal. In a jury box, if given the lack of evidence against her, and also given that Fred defended her until the trial began, you’d find one, maybe more, jurors unable to pull the trigger on Rose.

I think she was 100% guilty. But I also think they didn’t prove it. The members of the jury simply refused to believe a woman lived in the same house with a killer who buried bodies in their basement yet never knew what was going on. I refuse to believe it, too.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Seventeen Dog Years

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“Are you Mike Firesmith?” the woman asks at the event, and I wonder if she’s looking for the guy in dog rescue, the writer, the political activist, snake ID, or the guy who loans out the cat trap.

“Yes, and you would be?”

“Tammi. I was friends with your wife. We met once at the art gallery.”

Wow. Now this story ended, I thought, back in 2002, when the divorce was final and my brand new ex left the state.

“That was a long time ago, Tammi. I do not remember you, sorry,” I reply, hoping this ends well and soon.

“No, I didn’t think you would. You’re wearing the same style hat you wore back then.” Tammi hesitates. “That’s not the same hat is it”

“No, different. Three or four hats ago, at least.”

“She owed me some money and never paid me back. I didn’t care about the money but she just left and never told anybody where she was going. What happened to her? Do you know?” Tammi seems concerned rather than vengeful. She’s a bit older than I, with soulful eyes and I bet she’s got a cat that just showed up one day.

“No idea.”

“Okay. Thanks.” And Tammi wanders off.

I’ve lived long enough now that things pop up from the past that are old enough to legally drink alcohol. This doesn’t mean they should, but they do anyway, like some sort of sexually transmitted disease that randomly reappears. Personal History Herpes. I can go months without remembering I was married for 989 days, or as I refer to it, “Seventeen Dog Years.”

Yes, I did know she left owing money and she took artwork from artists who had no idea she was skipping town. Or at least that was what I was told by the artists. I suspect she stiffed her divorce attorney.

Tammi wanders over again, curious, like those people who slow down to take a photo of a car wreck. I worked in traffic and learned to hate those people. I still do.

“Mind if I ask you a question, Mike?” she asks.

“Shoot.”

“Did you think she had enough to survive when she moved out? I mean, I know there were a lot of issues, but honestly, what was she left with?” Tammi is serious. She isn’t taking a shot at me, I don’t think, and she seems to be trying to understand what caused the wreck, not just stare at it.

“I signed the agreement she and her lawyer drew up, Tammie, what else was I supposed to do?”  I can feel the anger rising from the grave again.

“I’m sorry, it’s just, I don’t know. This is none of my business,” and Tammi flees.

I sit and eat a third doughnut, wash it down with more coffee than I truly need, and I remember Rachel Louise Snyder’s memoir, where she says, “I want to be more gracious in my writing here. I want to say my parents did the best they could under the circumstances and with the resources they had. But I don’t think this is true. I don’t think they did their best.”

We both went where the lawyers led us. But the money and property were in my name, and her lawyer fumbled the ball. She wound up with nothing.

I’d like to be more generous with my writing here, and say I did the best I could ending my marriage, but now, looking back, I don’t think I did. I don’t think I did my best.

Take Care,

Mike

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.