Pink Nikes in Smoldering Grass

The morning started off as any other morning does…….staring at the coffee maker, hoping by some chance I can will it to move a little faster….notice how that never works?

After doing a little ad work from my office at home I stepped outside to let my doggies out for a potty break……(just to give you a slightly better visual, no shower, brown leggings, oversized ratty sweater that I should have thrown away many, many moons ago and even worse house shoes). Standing out on my porch I notice multiple huge clouds of smoke. In the last three years, I have learned that nothing scares the bejeebers out of country folk quite like grass fires, so I was immediately attentive. Being the Lois Lane that I am…..(ok, ok I may or may not have given myself that nickname after getting the newspaper job, chopping all my hair off and dying it black…….hey, it still works….right?) I immediately grabbed my camera and my Oklahoma press pass, hopped into Marsha and blazed down toward the fire, now this may not impress you much but how often do you get to travel towards a fire instead of away from it and firemen are always exciting, right ladies..?..

Here is another little secret about rural areas………roads don’t have names……rural people use landmarks like “Mr. Smith’s barn”, “south of Bill’s pond”, or “in between the two water towers”, during this entire escapade I was wishing Q was with me because he really knows these areas and landmark slang…..as for me…..well…..I’m a better city driver but the fact that I am stupidly fearless helps me on nameless dirt roads. As I try and locate the fire with only the help of a cloud of smoke billowing above me…..I started to feel like it was impossible and I began looking around and realized I might have been lost…….About that time I took a left turn and ran right into lights, police lights, fire truck lights, spot lights…….(ok, no spot lights but three kinds of lights sounded better than two). I barely get my ol’ Marsha in park before I’ve hopped out and waltzed right up to the boys fighting the fire. I successfully stayed out of their way and it wasn’t until I was about fourteen pictures in that I realized I still had not taken a shower and I was still wearing the same stunning attire that I had been wearing around my house and all I had bothered putting on were my pink Nikes. So there I was, bed head, brown tights, overly worked sweater, pink Nikes standing in still smoldering grass and although I had just realized what a hot mess I was……..it was clear all the hard working young men around me had already realized that fact……It made for some good newspaper work and a new experience.