Love, Life and Puppy Dog Tales

This is a different kind of snow. It is not the nice fluffy, cool, moist snow that you might think of... No... It is fire snow. Most people call it ash. But the sky was as black as any snow storm might make it and the outside, at least through the kitchen window, made you think that when you walked outside it would be cold. It was a cool, crisp 80 degrees at 7 am. This is Ashy Splashy! Yes, those are ashes on his head and near his eye. He just had to get involved. This is the ash on my TBird's windshield at 7 am. By 7 pm, it has doubled in quantity. If you stare outside, you would swear it was indeed snowing, the particles that are coming down are that big and noticeable. I feel like pig pen when I walk as my pant legs create enough wind to fluff up the ash as I walk. There are tens of thousands of acres burning all around us. The heat has been turned up and we're running in the 100's to 110's and the fires are just loving it, eating up more and more land...

The enormous black cloud that seemed to follow me home gave me a clue that something immense was pending. Todays sudden, albeit expected, massive downpour actually made me stop. I stopped doing anything (much to my dogs' dismay as they felt it was dinner time!) and just watched the rain come down. It felt like the very first time I had ever paused to notice to rain drops slamming into the ground. I watched the street and saw the colossal splash each mammoth drop made and it felt so tremendous. I actually got my camera out, laid down on the floor in my doorway and began taking pictures of the rain hitting the ground. I even spent time watching the rainfall through the macro lens of my camera just for the enhanced view. Suddenly, I was so much smaller than the huge rain drops falling from the sky. It was humbling. A close friend once wrote a poem about raindrops. It was about raindrops on a windshield. If you concentrate on the drops, the rest of the world becomes a blur a...