but without the immediate Threat of Fire there were small walks, short takes on the now stationary bike, Leon and Arielle Monday morning assessing the ancient sliding door, a massive

electrical storm that ignited a small conflagration across the road from the Fire

[now Incident] Camp which was extinguished too quickly to make in onto the next day’s map.

Tuesday afternoon the storm blew through before evening’s very pleasant dinner with

our neighbors from up the hill with daughter, son-in-law and most engaging grandson Daniel,

followed, the next night, by another storm and a power outage rectified, despite being ten miles up a dirt road and thirty miles from town, in an hour and a half by San Isabel, our rural

electric co-op. Thursday, thanks to Bill and Mu up the hill, it became unexpectedly time to fill

the water as the “monsoon” continued [I used to think monsoons had to be a bit more

persistently torrential]. Friday, too wasted to even take a picture, it was Walsenburg for the dump, Walsenburg Lumber for lumber, fence repair at the Habib [they cut our 10′ 2×6″ 10″ too short but melting in the heat we just let it go], Safeway and barely out of town at noon to reach the Gardner Post Office just as it opened after lunch, then home to ours, a lost afternoon

and dinner on the porch which we finished just almost ahead of the rain, unlike Monday when, soaked, we’d fled inside or Wednesday when after the electricity went off and the rain let up we sat outside watching the storms move down the valley [interim; homemade boats from the fifties and Winston Churchill, painting]

unto chilly darkness. The next hazy morning, after our morning rounds [breakfasts, small walks, my four minutes of stationary biking] we drove up to see what the library project was looking

like and found it good.  At least on the inside; the out is still in need of a real foundation whose time may never come…Maryann came to dinner that evening and Sunday, in broad daylight,

Some Thing [or demon] completely trashed Linda’s “Casa Mesa” [1987] which had resided peacefully in the meadow for over thirty years…a Day of Infamy, for sure. Parts were scattered as far as sixty feet away, almost as if a bomb had gone off inside it.

Monday we were in Gardner to regale Desireé with tales of the Casa Mesa mystery, way too hot

for around here until well into the evening [though still not nearly as overheated as everywhere else] when we heard that a week after Rocky Mountain lll had graded the dozen or so acres down where 620 meets the highway for their “Incident Camp” they’ll be handing Aspen Acres off to a new, smaller outfit based in Cañon City so Camp will be struck, doubtless in the tradition

[no pun intended, heh heh] of Burning Man’s “leave no trace”…and certainly no trace will be left of the drought stricken groundcover that preceded it either. Plenty of fires to go around,

but what were they thinking? It couldn’t have been cheap, setting that all up for just a week…