Can you call the Fire Dept back and tell them not to come?

On Saturday night, in honor of a lovely visit with Caroline and Magen (yes- it’s Magen! she never corrected my spelling)- we took the girls to a delicious Thai restaurant. Mostly I think we wanted to cleanse from vast amounts of Sonic and Thai food sounded like a good way to do that. So the babysitter arrived and we walked out the door (in a hurry to be kid free and to get some good food, because the ladies in the group were hungry) when Magen noticed this:

Yep. That’s my neighbors backyard. ON FIRE. So Ernie called 911 and drove down the cul-d-sac to knock on the door and see if anyone was home. We pulled up to the house and Ernie saw someone standing in the backyard. He walked across the lawn and peeked over the fence and our neighbor said, “Hey, man.” As if his yard wasn’t on fire. Ernie asked if everything was okay and the neighbor said, “Yep, just burnin’ some leaves and pine straw. It gets outta control sometimes.”

Ernie was still incredulous and asked him if everything was under control. Neighbor man assured Ernie he had it all under control. According to our neighbor, a couple times a year he rakes all the pine straw and leaves into square sections and then burns them all at once. Ernie said, “Well then, I guess I should call the fire department back and tell them not to come.” The neighbor responded, “You called the fire department??” (as if that were a completely unreasonable thing to do and that running a “controlled burn” in your backyard inside a subdivision was the most normal thing in the world). “Yea,” he said. “You should call them back and tell them not to come.”

So Ernie did that. And we drove away pondering Mississippi and it’s idiosyncrasies.