What a night

The boss and I went to bed early last night. We were kind of tired for no particular reason. Around ten thirty Alan tapped on the door, "Mom, I think the library is on fire."

I jumped out of bed and we went downstairs to look out the big windows. It is hard to locate just what is where, in the dark, across the river. By the steeple of the Reformed Church I didn't think it was the library. (We LOVE our library and our library ladies and wish that no harm come to them.)

You could see that whatever it was, it was big. Lots of lights and just a little flame, but over a large area. Too much smoke that towered pink and red against the sky like something in Mordor.



We tried to find out what was going on, but couldn't. No news on weekends. I tried to go back to sleep. However Alan called me again a little later, "Mom it is really bad and I think it is Jing's building. Jing is his good friend, whose folks run a little Chinese restaurant in a building just up the street from where my folks ran an antique and book store when I was little. (They have since moved.) Jing's family are hard-working immigrants who have brought a good service here and are a real asset to our community. But whatever, fire shouldn't happen to anybody. By the time we got back down stairs flames were shooting skyward from a huge part of the block.

Then the phone rang. It was midnight. Our phone does not ring at midnight unless it is something bad.

Sure enough it was the sheriff's dispatcher. There was a cow in the road near here and she wanted to know if it was ours. At this point the girls got up too and we all went out to look for it. While I was talking to the dispatcher she said the police were afraid the whole block would burn in Fonda. Terrific. I grew up on that block and although it is nothing fancy, it used to home to our family business. Now our friends and neighbors live and work there.

It only took a few minutes to find the cow (a heifer that somehow got out of the pasture), thank the good samaritan who caught her and held her for us and put her back in the fence. Today we will have to find out where she got out. There is frustratingly still no news about how bad the fire was or how many buildings are gone. Dang weekends anyhow. No news crews on. We feel so bad for Jing's family and whomever else was displaced by the fire and pray that no one was hurt.

What a night. Ironically we discussed getting Chinese last night. We do every month or so and would have last night but everyone was too pooped to drive over so Becky cooked. I suppose Jing's family would have lost whatever money we gave them anyhow. There are still few news reports except that nine people were displaced. Just awful