Ms. Pyromaniac

I may or may not be a pyromaniac.  Ok, probably not so severe, but fire and I have had our relationship come and go through the years.

Like the time I caught my boyfriend's kitchen on fire.  When doing the dishes.  While eating a PopTart.

Taylor and I were driving home from farmers' market one evening a couple of summers ago and came across a tractor on fire in a field.  We called 911 and made sure the farmer was safe.  

And there's the time several years ago when Cowboy Cody called to tell me he was stranded on the side of the road after our Dodge Ram farm truck burned up while driving down the highway.

Or the time we were in the middle of our Cowboy Gathering, our biggest event of the year at the ranch, where I'm the cook for the week of 3 meals a day for several hungry cowboys and cowgirls.  This one particular day, Cowboy Cody had started a fire in our huge concrete smoker, lovingly dubbed The Crematorium.  I was to watch the pig and lamb smoking in The Crematorium for the evening's meal while preparing the noon meal and whatever else I was doing.

I had to run up to the house, about a 1/2 mile away, for some things from the kitchen, and told my mom, who helps me for the week, I'd be back right quick.  When I came out of our house, which sits on the hill above The Barn, where our dining hall, kitchen and storefront are, sitting in a huge bottom ground area, I thought the whole valley was on fire!  It felt like the whole Ponderosa was going up in flames, just like the map burns across the credits of the show.  Well, it was only the lid of The Crematorium, which was mistakenly made of plywood instead of metal.  It's since been replaced.  But the pork and lamb were protected by none other than Reynold's Wrap Aluminum Foil and were absolutely delicious.

And we shouldn't even mention the time I was mowing the paths through our Hay Bale Maze made of big, round haybales when we hosted a Corn Maze & Pumpkin Patch for school aged kids and there was this one winding path that I couldn't drive forward into and turn around.  I had to back in, while mowing, and drive out.  No problem.  I've been on a lawn mower all my life.  You just stop when you back into a big haybale.  No big deal.  Unless the exhaust on the lawn mower catches a big, round, bundle of dry grasses on fire.  And it's connected to about 400 more big, round, bundles of dry grass.  Then it's big.  VERY big.

Life's full of surprises.

This one happened just tonight.

Many of you know that we finally got a wood stove for our cozy little home this fall.  We love it and are using it like crazy.  We even got a coal bucket for Christmas from my mom.  You know, the old-fashioned kind, shaped like an egg with a little handle on the back for dumping.

When we empty ashes out of the wood stove, we set the bucket on the porch until the ashes have cooled enough to dump them out back, in my old raised garden spot behind the house.

Well, today we had all been gone and when Taylor and I got home, there were only coals and ashes left in the wood stove, so I thought it a perfect time to clean the ashes out of the stove.  I put on my coat, headed to the front porch, got the bucket of old ashes and took them to the garden and dumped them.  I then proceeded back inside where I filled the bucket with hot ashes and put the bucket on the porch.  I then built the most beautiful fire in the now ash free wood stove.  We promptly warmed up and continued with our chores, unloading the truck from our trek into town, preparing to fix dinner, deciding what movie to watch and arguing playfully about what time the chickens would be in their coop.  All the while it was nearing dark and Taylor headed out to lock up the chickens.

That's when Taylor ran back inside and said, in a fairly calm manner, "Mom, did you know your garden's on fire?"

Holy smokes!  No pun intended, but, "Where in the world did that come from?" is what I was thinking!  And, how?  I threw on my chore boots, grabbed my coat and headed outside.  After I grabbed my camera.  Priorities, you know.

Taylor, bless her heart, grabbed the water hose, which was mostly frozen, only releasing a small trickle of a stream, then ran in the house and got a pitcher of water, leaving me standing with the hose and the trickling stream.  She then ran to get a bucket, we only have about 487 sitting somewhere around the house and milk barn, and wouldn't you know she got the ONE with a crack in the bottom.  So, by the time she got back to the burning coals, she was as wet as the puddle my trickle was making.

Oh, that sounded bad.

I'll just leave it alone.

Anyhoo, we proceeded to put out our burning embers, after of course, taking a couple of photos.  These are moments to blog about, after all.