Late in the afternoon, yesterday, as I was starting to finish up with my cupcake baking for the coming days, my cell phone rang. It was my friend; we don’t talk on the phone a lot (I don’t like talking on the phone), so I immediately wondered what was going on.

“I have to tell you about my CAP flight today,” he said. He’d gone up in the CAP airplane that afternoon to complete some qualifications in it.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The flight went fine, but as we were returning to the airport, tower asked us if we’d check out a large cloud of smoke south of the airport.”

Immediately, I began thinking the worst. He went on.

“We said that was no problem. I could see a large column of smoke. I then realized that it was coming from the area I lived,” he said, pausing. “It was right in my neighborhood.”

Please tell me your house isn’t a pile of embers! I thought, trying to stop myself from interrupting.

“I almost felt sick. I mean, it was right where I lived. We flew over to the smoke and I was thinking the whole time that the furnace had caught fire and taken my house with it.” Over the past week, he’s had to have his furnace repaired because it stopped late one night.

“Oh no.”

“Well, we got there and you know what was on fire?”

“What?!” Just tell me!!

“The house behind mine. The garage was completely done in. Can you believe that?”

I wonder what they thought when the saw the CAP plane fly overhead, I thought. “I’m so very glad that it wasn’t your house! I’d have been a basket case flying there, not knowing if I was about to see my house up in smoke.”

“No kidding. I told tower about the fire, and that there were emergency personnel on the scene,” he said. “And, I mentioned that it was the house right behind mine. They said that it was better than finding my own house on fire.”

He continued to talk about it, while I finished putting away the eggs and stirring up the last batch of chocolate frosting. “I’m standing here in my kitchen now, looking at the firemen across the yard. There is a trail of soot from that house all the way up and onto my deck!”

“Your afternoon completely trumps mine,” I said. “If you had a blog, this is the kind of thing you could blog about.”

“You have permission to put it on yours.”

“OK. I will.”

And so I did.