I stand on my back deck and look up at the night sky. The air is still and cool, and the stars are twinkling among the shine of the Northern Lights. It’s a welcome sight, a sort of calm before the restless night of sleep I would experience when I lay down that night beside my exhausted husband.

Just two days before, white and gray smoke billowed and bubbled and raged ominously from that same horizon to the northeast of our house, the high winds pushing a massive wildfire away and in our favor and saving us from having to worry about evacuation or trenching around our home.

Our phones buzzed, warning us that everything between mile marker 138 and 148 on Highway 22, and one mile west and east on each side needed to be evacuated. 

Our ranch is three miles west of mile marker 135.

Residents from Mandaree, the little town just seven or so miles northeast of us as the crow flies, were told to leave as rural firefighters and Black Hawk helicopters worked to save it. I could see them from my back deck, black specks moving across the sky, the thick gray plumes of smoke making those helicopters look like children’s toys. It seemed like an impossible task as the wind kicked up 70 mph gusts, snapping powerlines and wreaking havoc across the prairie.

Just an hour or so earlier that day, my friend 10 miles to the north of us looked out her kitchen window and saw smoke burning the corrals and old outbuildings of an abandoned homestead directly to the east of her. She called 911 in a panic. 

All the rural firefighters she knew, including her husband, including mine, including dozens and dozens of other friends and community members, were fighting fires five or so miles to the north of her by our church on the other side of the Blue Buttes. She hung up with dispatch and called all the neighbors she could think of who could possibly be in its path and then loaded her kids in the car and sat helplessly watching the grass and trees catch fire.

The night before, around 2 a.m., all volunteer first responders who were available in our community were called to the scene of a fire that had erupted near the town of Arnegard. During the night, the winds had picked up to 50-60 mph, and it would take three days to get that fire contained while more and more resources were deployed and more fires sparked and spread. 

That one fire was more than enough to handle, but in the next 24 hours, I heard my husband on the other end of the phone line say in his steady, stern voice: “All of western North Dakota is on fire.”

The Elkhorn fire, the Bear Den fire, the Charleson fire, the Arnegard fire, the Ray fire, the big ones … they all have names to us now, but in the heat of raging wind and black walls of smoke, to my husband and those on the front lines, it felt like everywhere they turned, there were more flames.

I looked to the north of the house, the east, the south, nearly every horizon was billowing smoke. 

“It feels like we’re surrounded here, Chad,” I told him, hoping he had more information than I did that would reassure me that our place wasn’t in danger.

“Well, you are. You are surrounded,” he replied with a reality that many many more were facing, even more dangerously than us in that very moment. 

I learned that sitting in our house with a direct line to social media reports from neighbors and emergency management offices, I might have had more information on the scope of the fires than the men and women focused on moving inch by inch in the black of the night and relentless howl of the wind, fighting for homes and land and the livelihoods that depend on it.

“I have never seen anything like this in my life,” my husband said as he drove his truck from one fire location to the next, trying to fill me in as best as he could when he could. “We can’t see anything out here, it’s like a black wall of smoke and dust. It’s absolutely out of control.”

I stood in the house, helpless and anxious. We had company from Bismarck. They had come to fill an Elk tag, but our fun weekend turned on a dime and we were left to distract one another, to feed one another, and to analyze and speculate and wait for the clock to hit 10 p.m. when the weather report promised a calmer wind.

My dad took to the hills to watch for any signs of new flames close to us. I watched my phone for any more updates. I called and texted neighbors. I worried about them. And then I worried about us. And then I worried about my husband and everyone out there in an unprecedented situation, doing the best they could against Mother Nature, who turns from companion to rival at the suck of a breath.

The winds did die down around 10 p.m., and it was close to 1 in the morning when my husband called and said he was headed home for now. My dad came off the hilltop. We all looked at my soot-covered, exhausted husband and waited for what he wanted to tell us.

The next day and the day after that, he was out again, mopping up flare-ups, assessing the damage, fixing the trucks, checking in. Some men have barely left the fire sites, too nervous to look away as the repercussions of a wind shift could put their houses in danger.

As I write this, some big flames are still raging in the badlands at the Elkhorn fire, putting ranches at risk and the National Guard to work. The Bear Den fire is contained but still burning. The wind shifts and dry conditions keep the first responders and ranchers watching the hot spots and continuing to put out flames. The helicopters land and take off and scoop water from Lake Sakakawea. The planes dump.

All across western North Dakota, a person will tell you their own story about these fires for years to come. Two men who lost their lives won’t get the chance. At least four homes were lost. Livestock were lost and killed. Early law enforcement reports indicate nearly 90,000 acres in Williams County were destroyed, with more in the surrounding counties.

My husband comes home from the fire hall and steps out on the deck next to me to watch those Northern Lights. His hair and skin smell like smoke and ashes. The light of two helicopters moved across the sky, little beacons of hope among the stars.

I’ve been eating a tomato and cucumber sandwich almost every day for the past couple weeks. This year my tomato crop isn’t as prolific as past years, but they are tasty and there are plenty to choose from when I step outside my door and go rummaging and hunting under big leaves and stems. I send my girls to do the same some days when I’m busy doing the dishes or making supper and realize they are so much like me, never truly prepared for the bounty, dozens of tomatoes of all sizes weighing down the bottom fold of their little shirts. 

The garden will surprise you like that. One day it will be all stems and tiny blossoms and the next you go out to find that forty-seven giant cucumbers just magically appeared overnight.

What a thing it is to celebrate the end of the growing season by hunting for ripe things in the cooling down of a late summer evening. The perfectly weird shaped carrot, the pearl white onions, the zucchini that is absolutely out of control. The picture-perfect tomato. It makes a woman feel like she’s accomplished something spectacular even if that spectacular thing was simply planting a seed.

If I’m being honest, this month the weeds have finally won the race to fall, but not enough to prevent those carrots from making themselves into the most perfect snack a kid could pack in their backpack on a Tuesday. 

My little sister has been baking bread. I think I’ve told you this before. It’s a little magic trick she performs to ensure that she remains the favorite around here, and it’s working. Lately, on the weekends she’ll bring over half of a fresh loaf (because her kids get first feast of course!) and we will toast it up and spread it with a mixture of mayo and sour cream, (a trick I learned from a friend who makes the cutest little cucumber sandwiches on rye bread.) And on that spread, we will layer thin slices of juicy red tomatoes, then the cucumber and then a healthy sprinkle of some fancy garlic pepper. If my husband’s involved, he will cook up some bacon to add to the mix, and no one on earth is going to stop him. But the veggies and the bread, they can stand on their own, which is something to say when bacon’s involved. 

I’ll stand over my kitchen counter and eat that sandwich open faced, so it’s really not a sandwich at all, and let the cucumbers and tomatoes sort of spill and juice back on my plate. I turn into some sort of human-shaped animal, devouring the whole creation in four hearty bites, no concern with napkins or social cues, because it’s too good and tomato season doesn’t last and the faster I eat this one the faster I can eat another one. 

My daughters have the same sentiment about the big Colorado peaches we pick up every other week from the farmer’s market. Peaches cut up and smothered in cream and a sprinkle of sugar will be a core memory of their childhood they’ll have tucked away to balance out the hard things. There are few things better in the world than a ripe peach and our supply never lasts for canning for freezing. We make every effort to devour them fresh and then mourn the last lonely fruit in the fridge as the weather turns. 

I drove by a rugged little house in a tucked away neighborhood of our town this morning. Outside the door with a little tear in the screen and up against the slightly faded, slightly chipped siding sat a small but vibrant display of perfect pumpkins and fake plastic mums. It wasn’t a grand presentation of the change of season, the kind that costs hundreds of dollars and looks like a photo backdrop in Martha Stewart’s magazine. No, it wasn’t that.  But in that moment as the leaves were slowly changing on the trees and the morning light was hitting that humble house along the sidewalk just right, it shone out to me in my current state of frazzled-mother-on-her-way-to-work-after-school-drop-off, as an effort of gratitude for a new season—a chance to show on the outside what this person was feeling on the inside. I pictured the resident of that house humming quietly to herself as she arranged it all and I was glad she made the effort then, if not for my smile, but for hers. 

When I say my prayers or make my wishes I send up hope that my daughters have a happy life. But happy can become such an ambiguous word when you try to define it. So I came here to tell you that we may have more control over it than we think. I mean, have you ever ate fresh baked bread with a tomato on top leaning over your kitchen counter with no regard for the mess it makes dribbling down your chin?  Have you ever picked a perfect pumpkin to place in your yard for no practical reason other than to have a perfect pumpkin in your yard? Have you ever taken a bite of a fresh garden carrot with a little bit of dirt still on it? Have you ever baked zucchini bread with your mother who finally gave you the recipe? Have you ever stopped to think that perhaps this is it? This is what joy might look like on the outside of our skin, me and you eating peaches in cream for breakfast every day for as long as we possibly can because we can, Hallelujah. Amen.