To The Summer Sweet

by Jeff Baker

I was fifteen and we were living on the edge of town when my Dad told me and my younger brother to get in the car that Saturday afternoon.

“What’s up?” Chris, my little brother, asked.”

“There’s been a fire just outside town,” Dad said. “Between here and Pending.”

Pending, Kansas was the little town about a half-hours drive from Millington. That was the larger town (“We even have more than one grocery store” my Dad would quip) where we all lived. My Dad had grown up in Pending and he said his friends had called the little once-a-week newspaper there “the Pending Doom.”

We could see smoke on the horizon as soon as we cleared the trees in our neighborhood.

We had the radio on (no satellite radio back then!) and Dad said he was trying to pick up the station from Wichita that broadcast panicky updates on the weather between songs. We kept the windows partway down, enjoying the feel of the summer air rushing through the windows.

We could see more of the smoke, a big, dark line that angled slightly east, fading a little as it crossed where the highway was. As we got closer we could see Pending’s water tower and grain elevator which I knew was just outside of town. The fire looked like it was a few miles south of that.

After a bit we could really see it: surrounded by miles of flat fields looking like green crew cuts we stopped the car on another back road. We could see across a field where there was another road and a line of low buildings. Further north of that was a pouring red fire billowing smoke into the clear blue afternoon sky. There were several fire trucks on the distant road, lights flashing.

“That’s on the old Country Road,” Dad said. “There’s an old warehouse out there. They still have a yard full of pallets. I bet that’s what went up.”

For a few minutes we watched the smoke and the fire in the slight Kansas breeze.

“I was all over these back roads when I was younger,” our Dad said.

“Hey! Let’s get closer!” Chris said.

“No, we’re far enough away,” Dad said. “We don’t want to get in their way.”

We watched the fire for a few more minutes. I couldn’t tell if it was being put out but at least it wasn’t getting any bigger.

Dad started the car again.

“Okay, let’s get home. Mom will be home in about an hour. We can grab some ice cream along the way.”

And that was what we did on the weekends back before cellphones.

—end—

Author’s Note: Yes, the title is again from Shakespeare. Sonnet #94. —-jeff