My wife surprised me and took me out to dinner this evening.  She got someone to watch the kids, got all gussied up to look more beautiful than she usually does (which pretty much makes me get all weak-kneed on a normal day) and we headed over the hill to the Bearded Frog in Shelburne.  They have good food at that particular establishment.  The last time we ate there I had to try three times to make something resembling the melt-in-you-mouth squash soup we tasted.  My soup was good but it wasn’t as good.

We sat in the corner, all cozy and romantic, only you can’t really have a cozy and romantic dinner when you are bound to run into somebody you know.  One of our neighbors and her daughter, visiting from New Jersey, sat at the table next to ours once things got hopping.  We chatted, of course, as was polite, and genuinely interesting in this case.  And fun.  We shared some laughter and the people at the next table over got into the conversation and it was generally a good time.

But the point here is that our neighbor is the one who owns the property where the smoke has been coming from (see yesterday’s post).  It was still smoking when we left the house for our sans children event.  It turns out she was away, came home about 5:00 to see the tower of smoke rising near the house.  She could tell right away it wasn’t the house (her first fear) and thought it might be the barn (fear number two).  Fortunately it was just a pile of hay.  It was a big pile of hay, combusted by the heat of the day.  Some folks pushed it around to make sure nothing else would catch, and smothered it as much as they could.  But a fat old chunk of hay is going to burn until it wants to burn no more.

The house still smelled of smoke when we got home, but it obviously was starting to burn itself out.  So no one hurt, nothing lost but a good deal of hay, and a mystery solved for sure.  The sky is still a little hazy but at least we understand more clearly.  That’s something.