What is Love? It's a neighbor with a garden hose

I missed posting my once-a-week blog post last Sunday. I have an explanation. It's a good excuse for missing my post, but not a good reason.

So I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle. I'm a city slicker. Although my dad went to great lengths to get us in the wild on camping trips and forest hikes what I didn't do much of growing up was building homes and fixing my carburetor. The closest I ever came to being a "handyman" was one time when my brother and I helped my Dad get our drill bit stuck in the catalytic converter of my car while trying to drill a hole through the filter so it could pass emissions. Good times.

Anyway, when Megan and I moved to Southeast Idaho we discovered that most families seemed to be raised to know how to do things like install their own electrical outlets and outdoor sprinkler systems.

Whatever.

That gets us to my excuse for not posting two days ago. Every year when Spring begins to arrive in Southeast Idaho my neighbor calls me to say its time to "burn our ditch."

History lesson: irrigation is the primary method of watering the farm crops in Southeast Idaho. Irrigation canals and ditches are spread throughout the region to provide water to the farmers. We happen to have an irrigation ditch in our back yard and like any true Idahoan we burn the dead vegetation off the banks of the ditch to help the water flow better when the water is channeled through the system later in Spring.

Each year my neighbor (who is from Idaho) and myself (who is not from Idaho) attempt to burn the ditch. Each year we burn the ditch and each year we almost create a wild fire. This year was no exception. We burned last Saturday and our goal this year was to not stir up any attention by doing it wrong or almost burning down something that shouldn't be burnt down. I thought we had extinguished all the embers that evening and I went to bed. I left early Sunday morning (before dawn) for some church meetings when I got a text later that morning from Megan saying there was smoke coming from the ditch. I came home in between meetings to douse the smoke with water and then went back to Church. I stayed after our services to do some other things after my family went home and again received another text stating the smoke was billowing and another shortly thereafter stating simply: "There's fire!"

I came home immediately to see several neighbors running through our yard with garden hoses to flames in a different neighbor's trees. I jumped out of my car and ran to the blaze with hose in hand and jumped into the canal. With the help of friends and neighbors we were able to suppress the flames and we put sprinklers on the ditch for the next eight hours.

I learned three lessons on Sunday:

1.) I am not from Idaho and shouldn't pretend I know how to burn ditches.
2.) Firefighting in a suit, white shirt, and tie is not advisable.
2.) Neighbors are important for many reasons not the least of which is for their tools and their help.

What is Love? It's a neighbor with a garden hose.