Some Unwelcome Excitement and an Epiphany

You may have heard that Texas is in need of rain. Oh, that doesn't even touch it. We're basically 261,797.12 square miles of tinder. While we have been relatively far out of the way of the wildfires, the level of devastation in Bastrop has weighed heavily on everyone.

So you can imagine how my heart came up in my throat when I pulled out of our garage and saw this:

Since we were already in the car and headed out, it seemed best to keep going with that momentum. So off we went to get a new football helmet. Fiddling while Rome burned, and all that. Within a mile of the house, about 15 fire trucks raced past us. My blood pressure jumped up a few more points and I decided there was no reason for me to be freaking out all by myself when I have a perfectly good husband--with firefighting experience, no less--who should definitely be let in on this.

His advice was to go on and get the helmet, then go ahead and go to football practice. Because, you know, this is Texas, and you don't miss football practice because of the mere THREAT of disaster. And thank goodness for smart phones, so that I could keep up with developments via Facebook. One of Katie's classmate's grandmothers lives in the neighborhood next to us, so through the miracle of social networking, I was able to see that they were being evacuated. (If you're tracking my blood pressure through all this, add three more points here.)

And then, as I was waiting in the Whataburger drive-thru, I thought about all my stuff...the things that could be literally going up in smoke while I ordered us dinner-by-number. My antiques, my books, my Christmas decorations, my scrapbooks. I expected to feel another surge in my blood pressure.  I felt, strangely, nothing. Will & Katie were in the van with me, as was Krypto the Superdog. I would be sad to lose the stuff--I'm just sentimental like that--but I knew in a really profound way that as long as what was in the van was okay, everything was okay.

And that, my friends, was a holy moment.