Meet the neighbors

When I was fairly newly single, I bought a house. I remember that week distinctly. I had a final exam in a class I was taking, it was end-of-the-month in the business I was working at which was the busiest time of the month, I had some kind of a court hearing to finalize the divorce and I was scheduled to close on the new house. Somehow I made it thru all that. I closed on the house on the last day of the month of April and the day was a Wednesday.

I couldn't afford to pay one extra day of rent so I had cleaned up the apartment, loaded all of our stuff into a Uhaul with the help of a friend and moved into the "new" house . It was very late by the time we got settled in but the next stay I shooed the kids out the door to their new bus stop and I went to work as usual.

By that Friday eve I was happy to be "home" and excited to really start getting settled in. It was about 5:45pm and I was talking on the phone to a girl that I worked with, trying to make some social plans for the following weekend.

When all of a sudden, my daughter K. blew into the house all out of breath trying desparately to get my attention. (yeah, yeah, hold on a minute . . . . let me just finish talking to my freind.) But really I could see panick in her face so I told my friend I had to go and hung up the phone. "Mom, mom, the back yard is on fire" yelled K.

OMG, I had not owned the house for more than 2 days and it was about to go up in smoke. I looked out into the back yard and all along the fence a fire was blazing. I commanded K. to go over to the neighbor's house to see if they had a hose. We had one, but where it was and how long it would take me to find it and hook it up is something I didn't have time to deal with. Then with hands shaking, I dialed 911 to tell them my back yard was on fire. I could barely remember my new address but somehow related it to the dispatcher.

My first thought was that the night before I had been mowing the grass and had spilled gasoline right outside the shed door. Although I had no idea if a day later the gasoline would still make that more dangerous, I was praying that the fire wouldn't reach that spot to find out.

I ran outside to see what was going on. K. had done her duty and the nice next door neighbor man who we hadn't even met yet, had his hose hooked up and was arcing the water stream from his back yard into the edge of ours. With the very highest arc ever, it was just barely hitting the fire. Then, within minutes I could hear fire engines roaring up the street and the fire-fighters came to save the day and they successfully put the fire out in a matter of minutes.

By this time a huge crowd had gathered to watch all the drama unfolding. As the fire was being contained by those brave fire-men, I looked at all of the strangers and started waving to them. "Hello, we're your new neighbors. This is K. and this is K." "Hello, hello, so nice to meet you."

Ha, what an introduction. And that is the infamous way we made our presence known in our new neighborhood.

P.S. - We did find out what had happened to cause the fire. Some boys were bike riding by our fence. Our yard was located right next to an access sidewalk to a park. The boys innocently threw a firecracker over the fence and the sparks caught the dried leaves on fire.