I remember once a fire began in the woods around our house and they had to bring in the fire break equipment. It was exciting to my brother and me. We were kids; the grownups never hinted that anything worse than some scorched trees could happen. We stomped out little flaming clumps of pine straw with our feet.
Today, up here in the North Georgia hills, there are forest fires. Right now, this minute, there are forest fires, but they call them wildfires now. They say that to date, there have been about 4,700 fires in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. All three states converge up in the Southern Appalachians, the terrain steep and rough and hard to manage. And there are thousands of acres burning right now.
A big fire, on Rock Mountain, is about 45 minutes away from our house. We keep hearing about evacuations and we contemplate our own exit strategy, with our clan of animals, our two ambulatory kids, our handicapped son and Roger's elderly father in tow. We watch the smoke waft by, see ash like snowflakes in the air and watch the sky for rain that doesn't come.
What is also a worry is that our big, old Family home...which I call the Big House in the books...is only right up the road. If our house is threatened, the Big House certainly is. Full of ancient Family mementos and Family books and Family furniture from more than a hundred years ago, it is built of old, old wood. Absolutely irreplaceable. Absolutely precious.
It is all rather troubling.
The odd thing is this: As I am writing another McKenna book, I am writing about a forest fire. I began writing this particular book months ago, struggled with it as I sometimes do, finding it disconnected and unsatisfying.
God, where am I going with this? I asked Him. I can't seem to get a handle on it.
And, as so often happens, I was driving along, playing with it all in my mind and....it came to me. How it would connect. How the storyline would play out. How this would lead to that and how it would tie it all together. Boom. In three seconds, I saw it. Yes, yes, yes! It was there again. That strange, sudden particular laid out. Happens all the time.
It was a forest fire. I saw it and how it would start and how it looked in the hills and how my people would react to it. And what it would do. And how it would tie several story lines together. And how it would lead on to the next book. And what the last line of the book would be. Cleansing, changing, catapulting us onward.
So now, I am writing about that fire while the smoke from the wildfires is thickening outside my window. How strange that is.
But it happens sometimes, in writing these books of mine. I don't know why or how.
Expecting my third child, I decided that if it was a girl, I would call her Brynn, like the character I was writing about. But, a Brynn child would have to have dark hair and eyes and I knew no child of mine and Roger's would. But it was a girl, she did have brown eyes and wispy dark hair and I named her Brynn.
In the books, Brynn grows up and marries a lawman named Max. A bunch of years later, my Brynn was grown up (a little) and married a man named Matt. He is a cop.
In the books, one character becomes a codetalker in WWII. One becomes a paratrooper who is in training in nearby Toccoa. As I was preparing this book for rewrite, a gentleman in our Sunday school class gives his testimony, showing us pictures of his friend, a codetalker. Another man speaks up and says his father was a paratrooper who trained in Toccoa. Many hours of interviewing and collecting memorabilia from these sweet men ensued; sustaining and fleshing out my characters.
So, now just as I began writing about a wildfire, the real fires began. Every day, we hear they are bigger. They are nearer. Some days, the smoke is choking, fog-like. Some days, we can barely smell it and we are lulled into thinking it's better. But, it hasn't been. Not yet. They just keep getting worse.
God's in control; if I haven't figured that out yet with the life I've had, I'd have to be blind. So, whatever happens, it'll be all right. Maybe not comfortable, but all right. And full of adventure and meaning.
I think this book, like all the others, will be pretty darn good. And I know it will all come together in the end.
In the meantime, we watch the sky for rain. And pray.