fire

Last week my neighbor had a noisy party.

The neighbor has a fire pit in his rather small back yard and he had a good sized fire going.

The noisemakers were standing around the fire talking – a bit loudly perhaps.

The noise was not a serious impediment to the reading I was doing, but it did bother me a bit. On the other hand, we live just a ways from the high school football field and some noise could be coming from that direction.

So I slipped on some shoes and went outside to check out the source.

First thing I noticed was a figure coming toward me. In the dark I could not see who it was so I spoke to the person. It was Juan my across the street neighbor.

“Dave, your house is on fire.”

I looked past Juan to his house across the street. Juan's wife Sylvia was standing on their front porch with a phone to her ear.

From Juan and Sylvia's front window the fire pit is in direct line with the back of my house and like good neighbors, they were on the alert.

Juan had not even bothered to put his shoes on, but had come running across the street in his stocking feet.

He called across the street to Sylvia, who terminated he call to the 911 operator.

The neighbor's fire does bother me. It is not too far from a cedar fence which is a few feet from a cedar shaked wall on my house. If things got out of control, it could get nasty.

On the other hand the owner (yet another Dave in my life) was reasonably careful.

I thanked Juan for his concern. When Dave had begun the big fire thing I decided not to hassel him with the legals of it all.

My nutty solution was to make sure I kept my fire insurance policy up to date.