Wind and wildfires

It’s been a few days since I blogged, but it hasn’t been boring. Sunday, Zia (which means Aunt, and in this case my Aunt Carmelita) and I had pranzo (lunch, but the main meal of the day) together. She cooked a great meal, but that was far from the story of the day. In the morning as I went for my daily walk, I noticed an extraordinary amount of wind. As the day progressed, the wind kept picking up, with gusts of 50 mph. It was howling all through lunch. Toward the end of pranzo, we heard a siren and remarked, because of the heat of 97 degrees, that someone was probably having heart problems. It was a benign conversation at the time. As I was leaving Zia’s house, with dust and sand blowing into my face, I noticed some smoke in the sky. We have farmlands pretty much as far as you can see to the west of us. It’s not unusual for the farmers to pile up their clippings and weeds and burn them, later turning the ash back into the soil. It is, however, odd to see the smoke so close to the residential area. Within a few minutes, there were more plumes. Then more and more. Three different areas in town had fires raging at the same time. Helicopters and planes were called in to drop sea water for hours. The newscaster stood under Zia’s apartment window to deliver a live report. Our side of town was blocked off from traffic only a block away. The pine forest that is right next to the beach was officially burning. It took about 7 hours of sirens, smoke, ash falling onto my patio, and the smell of burning wood, before the fire was out. This afternoon, two days later, the forest is still smoldering in spots. It burned in spots right up to the beach club I go to, Lido Ritz. I didn’t walk all the way down the beach road, but could see the charred area in the distance. Really creepy, and it wasn’t just our town. Termoli and Pescara, two of the bigger towns north of us, were also experiencing fires, as were a few other towns. The rumor mill around here is that some group of people started a bunch of fires for some reason. No one can give a reason. That night, Zia said to me something about the sirens and how we thought someone was having an emergency and how wrong we were. The whole area was having an emergency. Since yesterday, I’ve spent most of my non exercising, eating, or cleaning time at Lido Ritz. I do enjoy it there, and this year it seems very close to normal with people only wearing masks inside the snack bar.