Fire is a creature that sleeps by night, waking in the morning slowly as an adolescent .

Monday, after those two days unpacking,

we went to Walsenburg for errands

and, disrupting the Resident Deer, the Habib Building to collect a sculpture of Linda’s

and ferry it downtown to the historic Roof and Dick Building as nobody at the Museum

of Friends had bothered to inform her she already had a piece in their historic Libre 50th Anniversary Exhibition.  The MOF was anxious to include yet another and so with several less- than-astute [plus one most competent] helpers she crawled around on the floor for two and a half hours installing as I re-disturbed the deer seeking something that both fit in L’s truck as well as the generous space allotted me, eventually settling on “Drought, after Grant Wood’s “Spring Plowing””, heretofore unseen since its completion in 1976.

Once L. [pictured with competent helper Jarod + dog] finished we moved down the street for a

quick belated bite, hit the Safeway and returned to Libre to watch the fire, which had split

north-south, more ominous by the minute as

it spread ravenously into the dinner hour which was when Patsy, self-evacuating from her cabin above Red Wing, arrived with two Gordon Setters, setting off the volatile Aggie repeatedly

and for the duration of what became a two-day stay to Aguilar’s knee’s ultimate detriment.

Next day, the fire waking slowly, was fairly normal despite.  Patsy did a recon into the lower reaches of her evac area, I mudded the bathroom, we all walked up the knoll

before lunch and ate watermelon after as the valley filled

with smoke which,

when the winds changed, smoked us.  That night, having been

elevated to pre-evacuation status, we nonetheless enjoyed another fine dinner, ringside

at the apocalypse.

In celebration of the Fourth of July Patsy returned early to her cabin in the Manzaneros,

Linda took Aggie to Muffin’s for her since-Wall-Spring-sprained knee and I contemplated work to a soundtrack of “lost”  Coltrane until L. returned with news, most notably that the reason we’re in pre-evac is because they may close Highway 69 in both directions if the fires advance.

Calm initially became many more [and disconcerting] smokes for a day of unease

in the midst of which gratuitous panic was spread near and far due to the spurious rumor that we’d already been summarily evacuated so tankers can drop fire retardant on Libre.  Linda had to take time to put out that particular fire before we could concentrate on what we’d take

in that [still unlikely] event and start a [last?] laundry.  From the perspective of my La Cañada boyhood the fires still seemed safely distant albeit definitely rather large [at that point third-largest in Colorado history] and unruly.  Meanwhile Patsy returned from from her ridge-top adventure with some neglected essentials having enjoyed the view, brewed coffee, drunk it on the way down laced with with pecan-nut ice cream and collected our mail, all in time for lunch.

Afternoon we tried to relax as best one could within a density of smoke, which fortunately

slowly blew off but, burnt out from a day of sorting and uncertainty, we were too depleted and uneasy to attend the grand opening of MOF’s Libre extravaganza, so remained on the porch for champagne-fueled fire-watching and a fine if edgy dinner which culminated in the literal

explosion [not shown] of Little Sheep Mountain in the nine o’clock night, taking our internet connection down with it.

[things, not all the things, we might have lost but this time, largely thanks to dozers, graders, chainsaws, shovels and the scores of heroic hardworking humans wielding them, didn’t]

Thursday morning Pats packed up for Leadville as we continued moving firewood out from under the studio stairs while night’s nastier [ashes in the outdoor bathtub] smokes dispersed.  Our Fedex driver said the National Guard had the Red Wing Road closed at Gardner but opined the cooler weather presaged rain.  We couldn’t see much through the residual smoke

but in late afternoon a little rain did come up here leaving the entire landscape misty though

of course it’s smoldering smokes…

Friday, smokes still smoldering, the vaunted GMap everybody insists updates every second hasn’t even shown the fire’s end run around the Sheeps from two nights ago yet and low smokes everywhere, no plumes, impossible to tell what’s going on. Cooler morning air, though, bodes well for firefighting…

Mas mas tarde…