This morning, I awakened before dawn to the smell of stale smoke.
Initially, I thought it was the wind coming down my chimney and picking up the scent of last week’s wood fires in the firebox, but its prevalence and eventual resolution into something more akin to a grass fire than a wood fire led me outside to see if any horizon or, worse, pasture adjacent to Nogglestead or Nogglestead itself were on fire. I haven’t grilled in a couple of days, and it’s been years since I set my yard on fire whilst grilling (embers from the fire would occasionally alight upon and alight a mulched flower bed across the driveway-a flowerbed that was not renewed after the second such incident).
It also awakened my beautiful wife, and when you’re awakened by an alarm–even if it’s only the scent of a fire–you don’t go back to sleep easily.
I wonder if it was the remnant particles of this, suspended: 200 acres of miscanthus go up in smoke.
That’s a little northwest of here, so probably not. But sometimes we get the scents of grass fires that are dozens or hundreds of miles away.
Just we’d rather not get them while we’re trying to sleep.
