The Skeeters are Back

In early spring, I was hanging out laundry when I smelled smoke. It was terribly windy, too windy to be burning brush. There had been lots of brush fires but surely no one in their right mind would be burning anything outside.

Coming around the front of the house, I saw the smoke was black and coming from down by  the Skeeters. It's a cabin calling itself a lodge, back in the trees on the other side of the road, down by the bridge. The folks who own the place only come on occasional weekends, to shoot skeet, set off loud fireworks and generally disrupt my peaceful life. They are not bad people, just noisy. I'm sure it never crossed their minds that I live here because it's so peaceful. What a concept.

There were young persons there earlier in the day, zipping up and down the road on motorbikes.

But now, there was this smoke. I called 911. The dispatcher said a fire truck was already on the way.
After a while, I heard it coming. The smoke got darker and more voluminous. More trucks arrived, plus a water tanker. There was that popping sound I heard when the Yeller's house across the road from the lodge burned down that dark rainy night.

Finally, some of the trucks moved off and I walked down the gravel road to check it out. I'm not much of a gawker, but I do get curious. Some firefighters were working at keeping the fire from getting carried away in the dry leaves in the woods all around the lodge.

What was left of the cabin was still burning. I noticed the two motorbikes parked some distance away but the kids were nowhere to be seen.

Later, I saw the bikes in the back of a pickup truck that went by. I could imagine the kids saying, "Gee, Dad, we didn't mean to burn the place down."

The guys who do plumbing for me are volunteer firemen. They said the kids had been trying to burn some leaves in the high wind and the fire got away from them.

That was in the early spring. It didn't appear that they would be rebuilding the lodge. I did hear shots from over there on some weekends. A 30-06 rifle sounds a lot like a cannon.

This week, however, some big dump trucks and bulldozer worked to shore up the drive to the place. From the looks of that effort, something grand is going to rise out of the ashes. Already it's noisy.

This fine driveway gives a clue as to what the new structure will look like. Now, I'm curious, but the STAY OUT sign peeking out from the leaves makes me wonder if they mean me. After all, I'm their nearest neighbor. Surely they don't mean me. It doesn't say This Means You.

It doesn't help for my grown kids to keep kidding me about how I solved the noisy neighbors problems with the Skeeters and the Yeller.

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