August Rush- Disaster Strikes

   I knew we would not be making too many trips out west due to the fall semester starting. I have been going to school to get a degree in journalism and being in school full time while running a photography company makes things difficult. Most weekends are spent shooting weddings so we settled in for the long hot summer.
   August is a hot month and this August just seemed to be hotter than the last. Triple digits were killing all of my flowers and our water bill was over three hundred dollars, the highest it had ever been. I finally decided to just give in and watch it all sizzle away.
   Just a few weeks into my fall semester my nephew was diagnosed with cancer. We spent days at the hospital. I was missing classes and trying to stay on top by doing things on line. It was getting hard but I wanted to be there for Ronnie. He had just found out a month or so before that he and his fiance would be having a baby so all of this hit the family hard.
   On our way home from the hospital we saw smoke in the distance. I got a call from my son and he said that there was a huge wildfire. Stephen immediately called our firefighter friend. He said people were being evacuated so we went home to gather things up. We loaded up my sons rabbit, our four ferrets, the dogs, and finally convinced the cats to get into a pen. We spent the night at a church that was not in the path of the fires which were, by that time, burning all around us.
   The following morning we were told that we could go back into our homes so we took our pets back, unloaded the trucks, and headed back to the hospital to spend the day with Ronnie. He had just come out of ICU and was now in a room. This was a good sign but just after getting to the hospital we received a call saying that we were being evacuated again. So, we went back home and went to Stephen's parents house to wait it out. Later that evening we were let back in. The fires had come only four miles from our home.
   It would take over a month to get the Bastrop wildfires out and thousands of people would be homeless with over thirty-four thousand acres burned as well as almost two thousand homes. Life became stressful for us, for our family, and for our community. This was the moment when we realized that we just get through life day by day because anything more than that is not reality. At any moment everything you know can change and your life can become unrecognizable.