My Thunder, Stolen

Sunday morning at 5:30, while rocking Simon back to sleep, I noticed a faint smoky smell I hadn't noticed in my bedroom. After I put Simon back in his crib I wandered around the house, trying to find the source of the smell. Our house did not appear to be on fire. Were the neighbors sitting around a roaring fireplace so early in the morning? I woke Michael up. He checked the back yard and said he didn't smell anything, which wasn't what I wanted to hear. That meant the smoke was coming from somewhere in our house. "Maybe the attic is on fire," Michael suggested. We sniffed around some more but came up with no clues. We went back to bed for two minutes before worry got me up again. I went out the front door and was hit with a blast of incredibly smoky air. There was a fire somewhere nearby. How Michael didn't smell this when he checked the back yard is beyond me, but maybe his nose was still asleep. I dragged him outside to help me locate the flames, but we couldn't see any. It was 6 a.m. and a bit chilly. I accidently closed the front door, locking us out. How tv sitcom of me! Luckily, a back door was unlocked and hardship was averted. We went back to sleep.

The next morning I checked the news and found out that the fire had been fairly nearby and had burned 3 acres before being extinguished by several teams of firemen. Imagine that! A fire in Sherman Oaks. I called my parents and my mom answered. "What are you doing home? Shouldn't you be at church?" I asked. "I guess you haven't been watching the news," she said. True, I hadn't. I had only searched the Internet for news of a fire in Sherman Oaks. One that had burned 3 WHOLE ACRES! My mom then started telling me about the huge fire in the forest and canyons just miles from my parents' house. It had already burned many hundreds of acres and my parents were expecting evacuation orders any moment. My crappy 3 acres wasn't really worth mentioning now. Dang.

Anyway, they're fine. The winds seem to have blown the fire farther away from their house, but things could change. Yesterday, to get to my parents' house I had to take an odd "back door" kind of route to get around the roadblocks. One of those streets I took yesterday has now been consumed by the fire. Today an apparently homeless man and his dog were killed in the fire just a block or two from where I was yesterday. Horrible.